Spaces · Kadıköy, Istanbul

Commercial Interior Design

Turnkey Design & Construction

Commercial interior design is the work of resolving the layout, shopfront, lighting and materials of a shop, showroom or production space together — around how the team working there operates and how the customer walking in behaves.

Our Kadıköy-based studio has been handling design and construction under one roof since 2015. Some of the 94+ projects we have completed are commercial; the Othello shop concept and the Duran Doğan Factory in Arnavutköy are two of them. The sections below set out, in order, what we look at in a commercial project.

Why is a commercial space planned differently from a home?

In a home the layout is built around the habits of the few people who live there; in a commercial space you do not know most of the people who will use it. Every decision comes back to a single question: what does someone entering for the first time see, where do they head, and what do they struggle to understand. The second difference is intensity — a floor that shows no wear in ten years at home can age in a single season in a shop that hundreds of people walk through each day.

• Staff and customers use the same space for different purposes; the points at which the two flows cross are identified from the start.
• Cleaning and maintenance are daily work; whether the design makes them easier becomes visible within a few months.

Shopfront and façade: the brand’s first sentence

The window is the most-seen part of a shop and often the last one thought about. Yet adding a window display to a layout already built from the inside usually means giving up either depth or selling area. The depth of the display, whether there will be a back panel, and the limits of the signage zone are therefore settled alongside the first layout decisions.

A window closed at the back gives complete control of the scene but hides the interior; an open window shows the shop, and in return makes it necessary to design everything that ends up in the background. The other façade decisions that should not be left late are the direction the door opens, the entrance threshold or ramp, and how the front reads at night.

Customer flow: entrance, circulation and decision points

Someone entering a shop does not look at the product in their first few steps; their eyes adjust to the space and they find their bearings. The band of a metre or two just inside the entrance is therefore a decompression zone; a display placed there mostly goes unnoticed. The real arrangement begins where that band ends: the line the customer will walk, the decision points along it, and the till at the end.

• When the main circulation route drops below 120 cm, two people cannot pass each other comfortably; someone standing in front of a product effectively closes the route.
• The till is positioned where it can see the whole of the selling area and where a queue will not block circulation.
• At points that generate waiting — fitting rooms, the service desk — where the queue will form is thought through in advance.
• If no manoeuvring space is left for a pushchair or a wheelchair, part of the space becomes effectively unusable.

Merchandising: height, eye level and flexibility

The band a standing adult looks at comfortably is roughly between 120 and 160 cm. Shelves below it require bending, those above it reaching; both reduce the willingness to look. Best-sellers and new arrivals are therefore set at eye level, bulky items on the lower shelf, and visual display at the top.

The display system’s ability to change with the season matters as much as how it looks on day one. Adjustable shelf brackets, a continuous hanging rail on the wall and repeated module dimensions allow the arrangement to change when a new collection arrives, without calling in a joiner. A fixed and expensive display unit is impressive in the first year and limiting by the third.

Lighting: so the product’s colour reads true

Commercial lighting separates into two layers: the ambient light that makes the space legible, and the accent light that says what matters. When the two are brought to the same level nothing stands out; the space is bright, but the product is invisible.

The second decisive heading is the quality of the light. Under a source with poor colour rendering, fabric, timber and skin tone all shift away from their true colour; in shops selling textiles, furniture or food this goes directly to the sale. Colour temperature is kept consistent throughout the space; the same product looking different in the window and on the shelf undermines confidence. The window circuit is wired and timed separately, because it has to compete with daylight during the day and stand alone on the street at night. We set out the logic of layered lighting in our lighting layers piece.

Materials, durability and maintenance

In a commercial space the choice of material is as much an operational decision as a visual one, because the cost of replacing it is not only the work but the days spent closed. The first question put to a material is where it will wear.

• The floor is specified to a wear rating suited to the expected footfall; a matwell at the entrance noticeably extends its life.
• Column corners, door reveals and skirtings take knocks along the route goods are moved; edge protection here costs less than repairing the damage later.
• Matt and lightly textured surfaces conceal marks; a high-gloss surface shows every fingerprint.

Back-of-house: storage, staff and goods-in

The first thing sacrificed to enlarge the selling area is usually the stockroom; a few months later the boxes overflow into the shop floor, the fitting room and the space behind the till. Yet the stockroom is an area that can be sized from the outset, according to the volume of incoming cartons, the shelf life of the product and the frequency of deliveries.

The position of the goods-in door, the route from stockroom to shop floor, staff lockers and the break area, and the sanitary facilities required by regulation are all as much a matter of planning as the selling area. Keeping the staff route clear of the customer flow directly affects how the space works at busy hours.

Spatial order in production and factory buildings

At industrial scale the starting point is the production flow: a line along which material moves in one direction, from raw material intake to dispatch, with as little backtracking as possible. Administration, staff areas and plant rooms are then arranged around that line; work in the reverse order and production ends up squeezed into whatever the building shell allows.

• The office-to-production interface: administration usually wants a view of the floor, but a lobby, a double door or a properly sealed glazed partition is placed between them to keep out noise and dust.
• Forklift and pallet-truck routes are defined separately from pedestrian routes and marked visibly on the floor.
• Escape routes and the direction and width of doors are addressed at the very start of the layout; an escape route narrowed while positioning machinery is a serious safety problem.

Shopping-centre rules, permits and signage

In a unit inside a shopping centre or an office building, the limits of the design are also set by the tenant handbook: the shopfront line, the size of the signage and how it may be lit, the fire classification of materials, suspended ceiling and sprinkler requirements, even the hours during which work may be carried out. When that document is not read before design begins, a single façade decision returned unapproved sets the whole programme back.

In an independent shop, what comes to the fore is the business operating licence, fire and escape requirements, and the municipality’s signage permission. Because the detail varies by district, whether work to the shopfront and the size of the signage require permission is settled before manufacturing begins.

A single space, or a repeatable concept?

Designing one shop and establishing a repeatable concept are different pieces of work. In the second, the output is not only the project for that space but a set of rules: material palette, lighting scheme, the dimensions of shelving and hanging modules, signage proportions, till and fitting-room standards. When a new space is found, those rules are adapted to its floor area; each branch is not designed from scratch. For a single space this is unnecessary, but if there is any prospect of rolling out, establishing the rule set on the first project is far easier than writing a standard afterwards.

From our completed work

The Othello shop concept and the Duran Doğan Factory (Arnavutköy) are two of the projects we have completed in the commercial category: one about display and flow at retail scale, the other about spatial order at industrial scale.

Among our other spaces that receive visitors, Y.S. Real Estate Office (Arnavutköy), HD Law Office (Kadıköy) and Senkra Counseling Center (Üsküdar) are projects where the same questions of flow arose in a different form.

We set out how the process runs in our turnkey interior design guide. You may also want to look at office interior design and clinic interior design, and you can see all the types of space on our spaces page.

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