The Burberry Regent Street flagship store opens today, a week after its “soft launch”, the finest in store design.
2,500 square metres of store with Burberry’s “most advanced” systems yet, including a satellite system for live broadcasts, over 420 speakers and the world’s largest indoor screen, standing 6.9 metres tall. The four-storey store houses the full Burberry collections and includes a limited-edition line exclusive to this store, as well as a footwear gallery, a menswear tailoring room and the Burberry Bespoke area. The Grade II listed building has also undergone an extensive renovation worth discovering, in which many original features have been restored.
The building: 200 years before it was a store
The premises at 121 Regent Street were not built to sell trench coats. The building, designed in the Nash style, was built in 1820 for the Prince Regent, and over nearly two centuries it has been almost everything: a horse stable, an art gallery, a restaurant, a cinema, a radio station and a gentlemen’s tailor. In 2014, with Burberry already in place, it was discovered that the building still held an original theatre organ hidden within its structure, another layer of history that had to be restored before a single screen was installed.
The store as the website made physical space
What makes this flagship a case study more than a decade on is not its size (around 27,000 square feet, the largest Burberry in the world at the time) but its starting premise. Christopher Bailey, then the brand’s creative director and later its CEO, conceived the store as burberry.com turned into a walkable space: each floor reproduces a section of the website, and the physical journey mirrors the digital navigation, rather than the other way round, which is how phygital is usually approached today, starting from the store and “digitalising” it afterwards. It is the same idea we champion at BARRONVISUAL, built into the very name of our craft: the physical store and the online store as the same craft, not two separate businesses.
Cash registers disappeared, replaced by iPads with digital receipts. Garments carried RFID chips: when a piece was taken off the rail or brought into a fitting room, the surrounding screens and mirrors reacted with related editorial content, long before the “smart mirror” became a cliché at every retail tech trade fair.
