LSKD Hobart

LSKD required its store format in The Cat & Fiddle Arcade on Murray Street, Hobart. An arcade is neither a centre tenancy nor a street shopfront. The frontage is internal, the ceiling and services are inherited from an older building and the proportions were set by a structure built for a different kind of retail entirely. The tenancy is also long and narrow, so a customer moves through it in one direction rather than reading it at a glance.

The challenge was to deliver a format built around a defined sequence of zones in a plan that presents them one after another, without the store becoming a corridor and without abandoning the layout core the rest of the programme is built on.

Greater Group delivered the store through design, build and project management, retaining the layout core and re-ordering the sequence in which a customer meets it. The point-of-sale position, the community lounge and the fitting zone keep their relationship to one another, arranged for a deep plan where each is encountered in turn rather than surveyed together.

Working in an older arcade puts the base building in charge. Accessibility, servicing and the existing ceiling condition were resolved as design constraints rather than worked around after the fact, which on a heritage tenancy is the difference between a format that fits the building and one that fights it.

The completed store demonstrates that the layout core holds in a tenancy it was never drawn for. An arcade gives a format none of the things it assumes, no external frontage, no regular proportion and no say over the ceiling, and the store still reads as LSKD because what carries the brand is the fixture set and the order of the zones rather than the shape of the room.

For a programme that has otherwise opened in shopping centres and on high streets, that is the useful proof. It widens the kind of tenancy the brand can consider, which matters most in smaller cities where the best address is often an old building rather than a new one.