It
has been more than fifteen years since I lead the team responsible for
Sainsbury’s at Greenwich, the UK’s first low energy supermarket, and you would
have thought that things would have moved on significantly; but I am not sure
that they have!
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| Sainsbury's Millenium Store |
When
we were developing the design of that building in the mid 1990’s there was a
clear philosophical intent that drove the design process. We wanted to achieve a building that halved
the energy required to operate it compared with a standard store; but crucially
to do this in a manner that would create a more comfortable and well tempered
environment for both customers and staff.
These
human factors are important because we had a hypothesis that if you make people
feel comfortable in an environment then they will relax and be willing to spend
more time within the building. This
creates the opportunity for the retailer to be able to make more sales per
visit and these additional sales have a dramatic effect on the financial
performance of the store, significantly outweighing the additional costs incurred
in delivering the performance upgrades.
As
the design developed we gave considerable thought to what factors would
influence customer’s perception of comfort and sought to optimise each one.We started with natural lighting and the
provision of views out from the interior to the external environment, since many
people complain of feeling claustrophobic in larger retail units because they provide
no visual connection to outside. The
north light solution selected not only provides views out but also floods the
store with natural daylight and is fact an adaptation of art gallery
daylighting which has been specifically developed to display their “products”
to best effect.
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| Internal Environment Flooded With Natural Daylight |
When
it comes to heating and cooling the space the decision was taken to remove all
air conditioning as this is energy intensive and can cause discomfort because heating
and cooling is delivered directly on to customer’s heads! Instead the store floor was designed as an
enormous radiator; incorporating underfloor pipework that gentle warms or cools
the sales floor. The energy for this
process was derived from two sources, an onsite combined heat and power plant
providing the heating and a borehole the cooling.
The
final element that helps make the space more comfortable is the ventilation
system. In more traditional designs
fresh air is introduced at high level with fans blowing it down onto the people
below. The problem with this arrangement
is that the fresh air is mixed with warm, stale, moist air that collects at
ceiling level, so that customers never get to breathe clean fresh air. To address this issue we brought air into the
store from beneath the floor, delivering it directly into the zone that customers
occupy and preventing it getting polluted en route.
The
completed building celebrated its ten Year anniversary last October, so what developments
have been made in the sector since then?
As
a number of “eco stores” have been completed by most of the other major food
retailers, it is clear that the project has driven change. However, what is surprising is that the focus
of these subsequent stores is solely environmental innovation almost to the
exclusion of all other factors. Systems
that have been incorporated that undoubtedly reduce energy consumption but which
do little or nothing to improve the customer experience.
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| Rear View Showing North Lights
This
is particularly surprising since the sector has identified for some time that shopping
in stores rather than on line is moving closer and closer to a leisure activity,
where pleasure, comfort and authenticity are key aspects which increasingly
determine where we choose to shop. I
believe it is time that we again made the “customer King” and this can only
occur when customers and as importantly, the staff who serve them, are placed
at the heart of the design process.
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