Architectures of Display

Department Stores and Modern Retail

Anca I. Lasc, Patricia Lara-Betancourt, Margaret Maile Petty, Anca I. Lasc, Patricia Lara-Betancourt, Margaret Maile Petty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367343897
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317178958
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Through an international range of case studies from the 1870s to the present, this volume analyzes strategies of display in department stores and modern retail spaces. Established scholars and emerging researchers working within a range of disciplinary contexts and historiographical traditions shed light on what constitutes modern retail and the ways in which interior designers, architects, and artists have built or transformed their practice in response to the commercial context.

Part I

Displaying Modernity

1A world of furniture”

The making of the late Victorian furniture shop

Trevor Keeble

The final three decades of the nineteenth century saw the development of a specialist house furnishing trade in London’s Tottenham Court Road. Though the area had long been home to a diverse range of trades associated with domestic provision and furnishing, the rapid expansion of the retail sector in the later nineteenth century witnessed the development of large-scale, comprehensive retailers catering for all aspects of domestic furnishing design and provision. This chapter considers the rise of the specialist furniture and furnishing retailer during the later decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that furnishers developed to serve a non-elite, “middling” market by offering new goods to new consumers, and that the presentation, exhibition and display of these goods in dedicated galleries, spaces and windows became a finely conceived yet contested aspect of retailing. These new retailers offered an innovative mode for purchasing furniture and furnishings that was formed in distinction to the well-established practices that characterized the earlier years of the nineteenth century. These can be understood to have offered a polarized mode of provision, with highly esteemed house furnishing companies offering a bespoke service to the moneyed elite, the small-scale manufacturers and productions of workshops and journeymen providing for a relatively prosperous middle class, and a substantial trade in secondhand furniture providing for the majority.

Importantly, the innovations of these new retailers owed much to contemporary developments in the retail of other kinds of goods, such as fashions, clothing and smaller domestic items. The development of the department store in the later decades of the nineteenth century represents the most significant contextual influence upon the development of furniture retailers. Yet the influence of the “general” department stores posed a fundamental challenge to the specialist nature of the furniture and furnishing retailer, and this meant that practices and innovations, such as fixed pricing, the ticketing of goods, and advertising, that were taken up more readily for other kinds of goods, were challenged and disputed within the context of furnishing. In this sense, the chapter characterizes the final three decades of the century as a moment of change as furniture retailing practices become established and “formalized.” It argues that the growth of middle-class domestic consumption during these years constituted the shop as a contested public interface between the interests of the established furniture and furnishing professions and a developing culture of retailing, and that this tension complicated the nascent opportunities for display and presentation within these new furniture shops.

In a ground-breaking study, Hamish Fraser suggested that the transformation of the distributive trades in this period amounted to a revolution that took many forms. The most apparent of these, he suggested, was the emergence of static shops as the focus of retail trading (Hamish Fraser 1981, 133). The development of defined spaces in which new furniture and furnishings were “retailed,” as opposed to produced and sold, was innovative and reflects a dynamic momentum of change that can be seen to have formalized the relationship between manufacturers and distributors, retailers and customers.

The fundamental “respectability” of the furnishing trade, derived from the authority of production and manufacture and established through the personalized and bespoke relationships of patronage and commission, stood in marked contrast to the impersonal culture of “modern” retailing. Whereas until the middle of the century, the customer for furniture and furnishing would have received a highly personalized interaction with a furnisher, dealer or upholsterer, the increasing standardization of “products,” rising commercial competition and general expansion of a middle-class market for furniture and furnishing led to a more formalized yet anonymous relationship between the retailer and his customer. Within these shops, the identification of fixed prices, rather than prices based upon “the shopkeeper’s judgment of what the customer would bear,” regulated trading for both retailer and customer. Meanwhile, the emergence of new strategies of “self-advertisement” such as “window and front of shop displays” provided the retailer with the means to establish and maintain a visible presence and reputation beyond “hearsay” (Hamish Fraser 1981, 133).

While little coherent documentary evidence of actual furniture shops as they were conceived and presented during the nineteenth century survives, their spaces and images proliferated widely throughout the expansive print culture of the time. Evidence drawn from retail and trade journals, catalogs, advertising and ephemera describes changes that configured the shop as a crucial node that linked furniture production, distribution, advertisement and consumption. An uncertain yet nascent coalescence of consumerist representation found also in the international exhibitions, popular and trade magazines, and advice literatures of this time placed the specialist furniture shop within a contested territory in which it had to establish its place. The nature of this contest can be best characterized as the transition of influence from the established realms and practices of furniture production to the nascent commodity and retail cultures ushered in by late-Victorian modernity.¹

In this sense, the furniture retail space can only be understood within the context of other emergent spaces and practices of commerce at this time. Primarily, these were found in the innovations of the department stores that had developed throughout Western Europe and North America in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The principal difference between the department store and the specialist furniture providers can be seen in their contrasting approaches to range and scope of product lines. Whereas department stores had multiple suppliers who provided them with multiple lines of different goods, within which there was often only limited choice, specialist furniture stores carried a more restricted range of products but offered greater choice within that range. Importantly, the development of this kind of specialist furniture establishment, which also drew upon the longstanding traditions of the bespoke furniture trade that serviced the higher echelons of society, also created a new class of retailer in the form of the “salesman.” Just as the specialist furniture shop developed in the space between the department store and the elite, bespoke house furnisher, the furniture salesman occupied a position between the “general” and explicitly commercial character of the sales assistant and the specialist authority of the house furnisher, steeped as he was in the knowledge and traditions of furniture design, manufacture and production. This development and the challenge it posed to the established authority of the furniture and furnishing sector certainly contributed to the contested and uneven development of retailing within this specialist sphere.

The space of the shop

The London furniture and furnishing trade had, until the middle years of the nineteenth century, been a largely disparate one that ranged from the long-established house furnishers and decorators of the city’s West End to the smaller scale artisanal producers located in East End areas such as Curtain Road and Bethnal Green (Kirkham 1989). This industry of furniture manufacture and production existed alongside a considerable trade in upholstery, textiles and fittings, which tended to operate in an even more diffuse manner, ranging from the highest quality comprehensive furnishers of the West End through to drapers and small general stores and, more commonly, street markets.

The nature of this development created a highly stratified market for house furniture and furnishing with only the richest portion of society able to avail themselves of the comprehensive services of renowned West End furnishers such as Holland and Son, Gillow, and J.G. Crace & Son. The considerable majority of householders would have furnished their homes via the large secondhand market in furniture with its sidelines in property, appraising and undertaking, and with pieces handed down or inherited from family. Where finances allowed, they might also have purchased individual items from local makers and from the non-specialist general stores, ironmongers, and drapers that were common by the mid-century (Kirkham 1989).

An 1876 description of W. Waines Furnishing Warehouse published in the Furniture Gazette testifies to the growth and scale of a furnishing business as it steadily expanded into all aspects of furniture and furnishing. Located in Newington Butts in South London, this business grew from a single shop in 1848 to more than two acres of combined workshop and retail premises. Listing numerous rooms arranged according to different types and styles of furniture, the article notes:

There are also workshops in which every process of furniture is going on; in one, cabinet and chair makers are busily plying their tools; in others, inlayers and artists are employed in the decorative portions; polishers, couch and chair stuffers and bed and mattress makers; While elsewhere may be heard the unceasing click of sewing machine, and women be seen actively sewing together breadths of carpet and fashioning into shape all sorts of material for curtains.

(Furniture Gazette February 12, 1876, 97)

By the 1870s the “shop” in which furniture was both produced and sold was a fairly commonplace and sometimes substantial feature of many urban districts. While the intention of this innovation was to exploit retail opportunities for makers, the co-location of workshops and retail effectively put production on display. These hybrid spaces came about over time as furniture craftsmen and producers began to more formally arrange a portion of their workshops, usually toward the front of their premises, into spaces in which customers might view, select, or even commission furniture. In this sense, the co-location of furniture production and retail served to reinforce the specialist nature of the retailer, offering the customer some sense of patronage more commonly associated with the higher end of the trade. Its roots and connections with specialist manufacture and production gave it the authority to “advise” the newly affluent expanding middle classes for whom the opportunity of domestic design and furnishing was now a real possibility and expectation. This is an important characteristic of the furniture shop that differentiated it from many other areas of general trading such as fashions and smaller household goods that were less explicitly associated with cultures of production and manufacture, and were more keenly focused upon convenience and easing the experience of choice and purchase in a less personalized manner (Whitaker 2011, 63).

Of course, furniture shops were not the only, or perhaps even the most, notable form of retail developing and expanding at this time. The second half of the nineteenth century is synonymous with the development of the department store. The history of the department store abounds with tales of single-item sellers who, from the middle of the nineteenth century, moved from market stalls to grand premises in urban and regional locations throughout Britain. While many of the strategies and techniques used to consolidate these great enterprises were also used in the expanding furniture market, the development of the department store is significantly different in that it was projected as a “general” rather than “specialist” provider. The department store tended to reject the notion of specialization in its bid to be a “Universal Provider,” as William Whiteley self-styled his store established in Westbourne Grove in 1863. The boastful measure of this universality, that a department store would be able to supply any product or thing requested, serves to confirm that the innovation of this type of store was, in its unencumbered role as retailer, free to distribute any good or production at the request of its clientele.

Given its origin within furniture and furnishing production, the specialist furniture and furnishing shop was unable to operate in such a manner, and had to instead project the authority of its specialism at all times. However, in projecting itself as the legitimate representative of the furniture trades, the specialist shop addressed the aspirational needs of many newly middle-class consumers. In his study Retail Trading in Britain, 1850–1950, J.B. Jeffreys argued the importance of choice and individuality for the middle class consumer who, with more time and opportunity than his working class counterpart, “placed greater emphasis on specialization of the merchandizing function, on specialization in buying, selling, display design and advertisement.” Those stores, he argued, that went beyond the large-scale economies of standardized articles to offer “a range, a selection and a distinctiveness that could not be matched by other retailers were successful in attracting customers from afar” (Jeffreys 1954, 33). Given this, it is clear why the specialist furnishers that developed during the nineteenth century did so within close proximity to one another. Though they were indeed in competition, their agglomeration as specialist providers within the environs of Tottenham Court Road, with its nearby rail and bus services, in effect mutually enhanced their...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Architectures of display: An introduction
• Part I Displaying Modernity
• Part II Technologies of Display
• Part III Contested Identities/Contested Displays
• Index