The magazine Progressive Grocer--which carries the odd tagline "Ahead of What's Next"--published a short piece on The Market, the small scale grocery store found in The Pinehills, a planned development community built in Plymouth by New England Development and others.
The piece gives a short history on the creation of and the creativity behind The Market. Apparently, the American public is growing tired of big-box superstores, turning instead to smaller, more intimate markets presenting more upscale foods. (I wonder, though, whether this trend will hold given the state of the economy.)
Here's an excerpt:
The Market was conceptualized by Newton, Mass.-based New England Development with the help of Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Store Design Services (formerly Design Services Group), which is a subsidiary of SUPERVALU. “Our goal [for The Market] was to create a small-format store, but with full service, so it has everyday items and gourmet foods,” says Harry Steen, creative director for Store Design Services. “Most stores are boring square boxes,” adds Michael Szathmary, managing director of The Market. “We wanted to design a footprint store that is exciting and out of the norm, that doesn’t make you feel like you’re just walking up and down aisles.”
New England Development worked with Store Design Services for approximately nine months designing The Market, which opened in October 2008. “Elkus Manfredi Architects designed the barn-shaped outer shell,” Steen explains. “[The exterior] is actually built out of steel, and has a unique, vintage appeal to it.”
In fact, vintage, turn-of-the-century New England charm is precisely what the design group was shooting for. Store Design Services added plenty of vintage touches to The Market—from sandblasted wood signs and the dyed concrete floor that looks like rich leather to custom-designed, acid-etched metal fixtures, Steen says. Additional hints of the dawn-of-the-century look include old mining carts placed around the store, a hayloft-style bakery and cheese island, aisle end-caps modeled after old farmhouse bureaus, and a custom, 16-ft. farm ceiling fan.
Although all of the décor elements play into the store’s shoppable, rustic charm, the design team was careful to keep them understated, so that the main focus of The Market remains on the food products. “The interior is not overemphasized,” Szathmary says. “It’s not about the décor, and though the fixturing and lighting [elements] are important, they’re there to highlight the product.”
Why should you care? First, I'd still love to see a small market downtown, but only if it complimented ongoing efforts like the Farmer's Market as well as local growers. Second, while this degree of design in a supposedly "intimate place" that mimics a natural setting makes me a bit queasy (sort of like the efforts that go into making casinos so darn enticing), the Market demonstrates how detail-oriented NED can be in devising a project to fit into a community, or at least perform a function.
This leads me to my final point. We can have all the chatter we want about the NRA waterfront parcels. In my eyes, the project NED eventually builds will have a greater impact on the downtown and the perception of our community than those two remaining parcels. We have to keep our eyes on that ball.
6 comments:
Increasing support for buying locally grown food IMO is best encouraged with the "honey" of fun,good taste,and sociable experiences. Maybe aided by attending to any little barriers of zoning, regulations, etc. that could be sensibly adjusted. Since the 'marketplace' will determine success, it has to do with the development of increasingly informed consumers.
RM
Food is the cheapest way to pretend you're affluent. A Mercedes is expensive. A house on the water in Marblehead is really expensive. Some fancy cheese and overpriced chicken -- not so much.
So yuppies in diminished circumstances may increase their spending on fancy food to tell themselves that they're still members of the creative class.
Interesting point, PKL. Although my financial situation continues to deteriorate, I still shop at places like Tendercrop because it's the last vestige of the lifestyle to which I had become accustomed. What a fancy-schmancy sentence ...
a market downtown? where would you park? bad idea.
I love how so many people in this town have an axe to grind with "yuppies". I should start picking on greasers, socs, flappers and other class degradations that died decades ago. Or maybe that's just too bourgeois of me?
Bean makes a semi-valid point. There's no consensus term for the people I'm describing.
Richard Florida calls them the creative class. David Brooks coined the word bobos. The Claritas marketing firm uses the cluster names "Bohemian Mix" and "Money & Brains." I tend to use "the mandarin class," because the class defines itself so powerfully by its academic achievements.
But people tend to know who I'm talking about if I use the term yuppie, so I'll keep using that word until Bean proposes something better.
Post a Comment