People who come to me about a shop arrive at a different stage than people who come about a house. With a house they are still thinking. With a shop the lease is signed, the drawings are done, and the builder starts Monday.
Nobody in a small law office wants people walking behind their chair all day. A takeaway shop wants the queue out the door and the longer it gets the better. Two ends pull on a commercial space, and a house only ever has one of them.
Which end the business lives off
A solicitor’s office, an accounting practice, a clinic. Clients come by appointment, someone meets them, they sit in a room, and how long they stay is the host’s call. The weight sits with the people working. Who sits where, what is behind them, what they see when they look up, how many times a day someone walks past their back.
A shop or a café moves the weight to the other end. Nobody has an appointment. They are walking past and they turn in, or they don’t. Here you work out which side people arrive from, what they see in the first second, where they stop, and whether they can pay from where they stopped.
Same principles, different order of operations. When the residential method gets applied to a shop unchanged, the fault is usually that the customers have been read as residents.
The principal’s seat
This is the first thing I fix in an office. Three requirements.
A solid wall behind. A glass partition doesn’t count, a bookcase barely counts, and I have seen a row of plants put there to do the job. Sydney open-plan floors are fond of frosted glass for this, which looks tidy and still lets you catch the shape of someone moving behind you. The old phrase is support behind you, and it means something quite ordinary: nobody concentrates for long while people can approach from a direction they cannot see. Anyone who has worked open-plan knows this without being told.
The door in view. Not square on. A glance to the side is enough. You want to register that someone has come in without waiting until they are at your desk.
Not sitting with your back to the door. Worth saying separately, because in leased open-plan space the desks were laid out around power and data points, and the person running the place often ends up in the one bay facing away from the entrance.
Where there is no wall to be had, pick a direction with at least no walkway behind it, add a high-backed chair, or turn a run of filing cabinets sideways behind you.
Keep the staff route out from behind that chair
The printer and the kitchenette generate most of the walking in any office. The toilets count too, though nobody gets to move those. If they sit on the side behind the principal’s desk, that is dozens of passes a day behind someone’s head. Moving the printer is easier than moving the person, and which wall the power and data points are on decides how far it can actually go, so check that before anyone draws it up.
The counter
The counter has to do three things at once: watch the door, watch the stock, and stay out of the way. It is also the spot the most feet pass in a day, which is why I settle it first and lay the rest out around it.
Watching the door is loss prevention and it is also greeting. Customers can tell whether anyone looked up when they walked in. Watching the stock is ordinary retail practice. Staying out of the way is the one that gets botched: put the counter hard against the entrance and the first step inside puts you at the back of a queue, and the person behind you doesn’t come in at all.
There is an older rule that a counter must not sit square-on to the entrance. I have never settled that one. Practitioners differ, and I position counters off the three requirements above.
An aside, since it comes up. The cafés opening in Sydney these last couple of years put the bar further and further forward, nearly against the door. Nothing to do with orientation. Staff are expensive and hard to keep, so one barista makes the coffee and takes the money, and the bar has to sit where both are in reach. What you get is a queue that starts at the first step inside. I keep meeting layouts that were really decided by the wage bill.
The sign faces one way, the shop may face another
For houses I say the facing is taken from how the place is actually used rather than from a rule. A family that comes and goes through the side door every day has its entrance at the side door. Shops are the same and more so.
A shop’s sign faces the main road, because that elevation is the one council approved and that is the address on Google. But customers come in through the back door off the car park, because there is nowhere to park on the main road. The facing of that tenancy is at the back.
I don’t have a fixed answer here, because every shop draws its traffic differently. Stand at the door for half an hour and count which side people arrive from. If there are doors on both sides, both count, and you read each on its own terms.
In Australia there is not much you can change
The premises are usually leased. The lease says what you may and may not alter, and at the end of it a make-good clause wants the space handed back the way you found it. Load-bearing walls being off limits is obvious, but plenty of leases also want the landlord’s written consent for non-structural partitions, floor finishes, even ceiling lighting tracks. Fit-out drawings go through approval, and fire egress and accessible path widths are fixed dimensions set by the National Construction Code, with AS 1428 behind the accessibility parts. None of that is a negotiation.
So a leased shop is not the same job as a house someone is building. There I can say move that wall in a metre. In a shop I arrange things inside a frame that is already fixed: the door is where it is, the columns are where they are, and moving a power point once costs real money.
A thirty-square-metre tenancy with the door at one end, storage and the toilet at the back, and a column left of centre only has two or three places a counter can physically go. Set those against staying out of the way and seeing the door and the position falls out. The hard job is a large empty open-plan office where everything is changeable and nothing is decided, and the time goes on asking people how they move around and who needs to speak to whom several times a day.
Shopping centre tenancies
These need saying separately. Inside a centre the orientation that governs is the circulation of the mall, not the compass. Which entrance people use, where the escalators land, where the anchor tenants are: those settle the walking route for the entire floor.
I still take the bearings. But the only daylight in there comes through the atrium roof and none of it reaches your shopfront, and the landform layer has already been settled by the centre’s planners. The tenancies that give me most trouble sit back in a side arm off the main run, where nobody passes unless they were already coming to you.
The southern hemisphere layer is unchanged
Same as for houses. Landform doesn’t flip, the star cycle doesn’t flip, the compass reads as usual. What flips is the Later Heaven placement of the trigrams and the way the solar terms are applied. I have written that out in the piece on why facing south fails in Australia.
The thing to watch in a shop is western sun. A west-facing glass shopfront becomes unpleasant after three in the afternoon and the air conditioning will not fix it. West is west in both hemispheres, so nothing turns over here, and yet people manage to get confused about it.
What I don’t offer
I won’t tell you the business will do well once the layout is fixed, and I don’t give a view on revenue. Whether a shop works depends on the rent, the product, the staffing, and the foot and vehicle traffic on that street, and every one of those outweighs orientation. Whether the business is viable, or whether the lease is worth signing, belongs with an accountant or a commercial adviser.
What I can do is find the things in the space that will grind on people every day. The person in charge who can never quite settle, or customers meeting a queue two steps inside the door. The directional layer I chart and I report, I just don’t lift it out and present it as the conclusion.