When nearly anything can be bought with a few taps on a screen, brick-and-mortar stores have to work harder—and smarter—to earn a visit. Retail design, and the magic of merchandising, is something e-commerce can’t capture, even with the best software engineers. From a jewel-box fashion boutique in Paris to a bright, inviting kitchen and home goods shop in New York City, AD PRO highlights the big ideas shaping today’s most engaging retail environments.
Design for Desire, Not Just Function
The first goal for any new retail space is obvious: Make people want to be there. At Parisian boutique Rubirosa’s, designed by Louis Charles Aka, there’s a whiff of Wes Anderson whimsy. The 500-square-foot shop features cashmere sweaters, crisp poplin shirts, and soft leather slippers in multiple colors stacked to the ceiling inside tall lacquered bookcases. Most striking, however, is the dense, velvety red La Maison Bineau wall-to-wall carpet. “I spent everything on the red carpet,” Aka declares. “People criticized, ‘You will have to change it in three months.’ I said, ‘We don’t care. We want people to feel special.’” The saturated red—the color of desire itself—and the timeworn quality it lends the space creates an immediate emotional hit.
AD100 designer Brigette Romanek took a more subtle approach to creating desire at Catherine Bloom for Nordstrom, an appointment-only shop in Los Angeles where Bloom, the department store’s new Director of Luxury Styling, works with private clients. “I want to make people feel something,” says Romanek. “A store should be a destination you look forward to.” Her use of paneled walls in camel, khaki, and rose suede, plus her signature mix of elements both edgy (the angular leather sofa) and delicate (the plasterwork ceiling) creates what she calls “a protected feeling” that makes the space feel worth seeking out.
Where Romanek’s space whispers intimacy, Katherine Lewin’s Big Night shouts joy. The New York City shop Big Night, which sells brightly hued kitchen and entertaining goods, trades old-world refinement for modern exuberance. “People tell me they get a shot of serotonin walking into the store,” she says. Her brand’s signature color of punchy red-orange provides what she calls a “wallop”—an immediate sensory experience that registers before customers even process what they’re looking at. Handmade tiles from Smink Studio, screen-printed with bold geometric patterns, are mixed in unexpected color combinations throughout the West Village store.
Build Spaces That Encourage Lingering
Once you’ve lured customers in, the next challenge is keeping them there. “If someone is waiting for their partner to try on 50 things, they need to be comfortable,” says Romanek, who installed upholstered chairs from her collection for Crate & Barrel inside individual dressing rooms. Meanwhile, curtains at the store stay closed at all times, enhancing the protected atmosphere that encourages clients to relax and take their time.
Beth Hutchens, founder of fine jewelry line FoundRae, has turned lingering into an art form. The average customer stay at her fine jewelry boutiques—which include locations in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Dallas, Palm Beach, and, most recently, Aspen—is an hour and a half. It makes sense when you consider the cozy reading nooks well stocked with books and a rotating menu of complimentary snacks and wine.
Make Discovery Part of the Experience
In the age of algorithmic shopping recommendations, physical retail can offer something genuinely different: the pleasure of stumbling upon the unexpected. When Lewin found Big Night’s West Village location, for instance, it was a warren of small spaces and hidden corners that defied traditional notions of retail flow. Rather than optimizing for efficient shopping (and increasing her renovation costs), she embraced the pre-existing layout and discovered that it primed shoppers’ sense of exploration and surprise. “The store feels like a house party with different things happening in different corners,” Lewin explains.
FoundRae takes discovery to remarkable lengths. Hutchens installed fully realized miniature vignettes behind unmarked cupboard doors—doll-size rooms that include recreations of her own home and FoundRae boutiques, complete with furniture and art. Display cases feature what Hutchens calls a “menagerie of the ephemeral”—handwritten letters, old photos, and evocative found items loosely pinned behind the jewelry. Then there are the “Discovery Drawers”—wood-fronted, glass-topped compartments that hold one-of-a-kind pieces unique to each location (never photographed or featured online).
Even in Rubirosa’s tiny space, Aka has created moments of discovery. He’s filled the walls with oil portraits of Luciano Pavarotti, Pope John Paul II, and various international dictators—a quirky mix of imagery that gives the space a distinctive personality. Visual layers invite clients to continuously notice new details, rewarding repeat visits.
Design for the Camera
Aka admits that Rubirosa’s Instagram-friendly storefront serves as what he calls “a lure”—beautiful enough that people stop to photograph it even if they don’t come inside. “Some people come just to take pictures in front,” he says. The combination of the crimson carpet, dark lacquered millwork, and those quirky framed portraits creates an irresistibly photogenic and TikTok-friendly environment. Romanek’s thoughtful color palette and material mix at the Nordstrom boutique creates a similarly camera-ready backdrop. The social media effect, says Romanek, is simply a natural byproduct of creating a distinctive space. “When a space feels different, conversations about it happen,” she explains. “And that’s what we like. We like people talking about the experience.”
Embrace Site-Specificity Over Scalability
Hutchens believes store design isn’t inextricably tied to scalability. “Ask yourself, if every store was your only store, what would you do and how would you invest in it and change it?” she says. “You evolve faster when you think that way.”
While all seven FoundRae stores share some design DNA—Hutchens embeds her signature mythological symbols in floors, ceilings, and furniture throughout—each reflects its location. The Aspen boutique is swathed in green, alluding to the town’s namesake aspen trees, with a large marquetry sunburst as its centerpiece. The Palm Beach shop features gilded verre églomisé, while in Miami, a vintage Steinway grand piano with hand-applied gold symbols anchors the room. As a result, the stores feel both part of a cohesive brand while rooted in their specific communities.
Even Lewin’s three Big Night locations—Brooklyn, West Village, and the Upper East Side, which she calls “sisters, not twins”—each have distinct personalities while maintaining the brand’s joyful, color-saturated identity. Lewin likens the Upper East Side shop to a Classic Six apartment and notes that the new millwork was designed to reflect an upscale, elevated home. Her cash desk placement in the West Village location, situated in the center of the largest room rather than tucked away, came from understanding that specific space and how her team could best interact with customers there.
The thread connecting these diverse approaches is a fundamental understanding that physical retail can no longer compete with e-commerce on convenience or selection. But the best retail spaces offer atmosphere, discovery, community, and the experience of being somewhere that feels genuinely special. As Aka puts it, “Like a good movie, when it ends...if you don’t have the feeling you want to see it again, it was not that good.”
