Shopkeeping by Peter Miller

Author:Peter Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC

In the winter, the flat gray light gave us a lifeless appearance, especially from across the street. Our afternoons seemed unusually quiet. By adding a very plain Italian desk lamp with a sixty-watt incandescent bulb, we looked suddenly quite alluring. And open.

How Do You Look

A good shop takes its direction from the existing space—where is the natural light, how does it change, what will it affect? You may decide to block the view to the street, to create privacy and enclosure and give yourself a true stage for a shop window. That is the typical department store solution.

Or you may want to leave the window as a visual access into the store, declaring yourself in a most open and clear way. There are advantages to both solutions, but there are consequences as well.

You must go outside your shop and look at it—in every season and at many different times of the day. It is literally how you look and how you are perceived.

I know a kitchen shop that has blocked each of its windows with wire Metro shelving, stacked high with many products, pots and pans, and colanders. And you cannot see into the shop at all.

To me, the window display signals only clutter and even excess and reminds me of the worst parts of my own pots and pans beneath my counters. I am sadly reminded I must do some serious cleaning and not buy more things.

The shop is blessed with lovely light from the south. Let the light in on the collection of French pots and pans. I want to see into the space much more than I want to see a stack of inventory.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall—or a blocked window.

If you leave your display windows open, you face a harder task of display. We thought ourselves very clever by making an open display with some lower bookcases set back from the picture window. Anyone could walk up to the display case and reach the books that were on display.

It worked elegantly for a moment. But soon the customers had pulled out the new books, laid their coats across the top shelf, and left strollers parked every which way.

We solved the problem with a very low, symbolic, and nonstructural railing detail. It was only a very thin rod with a couple of upright pieces, but it worked perfectly.

It was a metaphor of a fence—a two-foot-high mock-up, a quarter-inch steel rod literally laid atop two upright chunks of wood. It was too thin and too low to put a coat on.

Shopkeeping is not a universal affection. Julia Child was a kind of shopkeeper, but Vladimir Putin is not. The Yankees would turn America into “a nation of shopkeepers.” The Deep Southerners were “a race of statesmen, orators, military leaders and gentlemen.” And distinctly not shopkeepers.

Albert Einstein was a kind of shopkeeper—and General Robert E. Lee was not.

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