LSKD Chatswood Chase, Sydney

By Chatswood Chase the format was settled. The fixture kit, the signage tiers, the community area and the fitting zone were all documented and built several times over, so the interior was a specification exercise rather than a design question. The shopfront was not. The centre set its own requirements for the frontage, and the store had to present itself within a tenancy line and a materials standard the format had not previously met.

The challenge was to give the shopfront the attention a centre frontage demands while adding nothing to the interior that the rest of the network would then have to carry.

Greater Group specified the interior almost entirely from precedent. Floor tiling matched the finish used at Indooroopilly, the magnetic wall bay panels followed the folded aluminium detail developed at Highpoint, and the joinery, the signage tiers and the fitting rooms were issued from the standing kit, which meant the interior could be priced and ordered with very little left open.

The shopfront was then treated as a piece of design work in its own right, built as a new structure with a rendered finish and integrated illuminated signage, and resolved with the centre’s design management alongside the base building requirements the lease imposed.

The completed store demonstrates the return a documented programme produces, which is not that every store becomes identical but that the effort available on any one of them can be spent where the site genuinely differs.

For a network still opening, that is the practical value of the system. The interior of a new store now costs the programme very little in design attention, so a demanding frontage, a heritage tenancy or an unusual plan can be given the time it needs without extending the store’s overall programme.