When Jurgen Schulz, owner of a surf, skate, and snowboard actionsports chain in San Diego, California, decided to open a third location, he called Jeff Grant and TRIO Display. Jurgen had been impressed by a remodel TRIO had done for another one of his locations. “I had a great experience with Jeff when we remodeled the Encinitas store back in 2002, and he was the natural choice for this job. It also helps that Jeff is a surfer.”

The first step was visiting the Oceanside, California, space with Jurgen, and a conceptualizing session to rough out how to best implement Jurgen’s vision in the space. In an earlier life, the store had been a Ducati motorcycle shop. The task was re-imagining the 4000 square-foot space as a boardsports store aimed at the 18-34 year old male demographic.

It’s the “arm-waving”� phase of design-build, where counters, cash wraps, and clothing displays are conjured up and arranged at the wave of a hand while the owner and the designer stand in the empty space. Fortunately, Jurgen had a good idea of what he wanted. Jeff and Jurgen built a virtual store there on the Pacific Coast Highway.

Back at Trio, Jeff worked on the floor plan with Design Director Brian Jones. Placing the cash wrap proved problematic. The building had an off-center front door that made centering the unit difficult. The elegant solution? “We ended up clocking it 45 degrees, opening up the store in an unpredictable way”� said Jones. Once they laid out a floor plan with counter placement, it went back to Jurgen for approval.

Next came the walls. One of the more interesting design elements is a two-story surfboard rack equipped with a rolling library ladder. “You can merchandise up to about eight feet, but going higher adds excitement and fills the shop to the gills,” said Jones. Grant and Jones envisioned paving the walls with asphalt and mocked up a vertical roadway for the skateboard rack (an idea which was eventually rejected by Jurgen).

Sometimes the abstraction of the blueprint runs athwart the reality of the bricks and mortar. Plugging into the actionsports demographic at the retail level requires a robust audio-visual presentation playing boarding videos nonstop. To this end, the initial K-5 plan called for a huge projection screen, but when Jones saw how the ambient light from outside the store shone through the windows, it became obvious the stronger luminescence of plasma screens was required.

The design didn’t stop with the interior floor plan. Armed with Photoshop, software that enables artistic manipulation of photos, the design team re-imagined the storefront with different color schemes, stone planters, and signage. “We study the local building ordinances before mocking up the signage,” said Jones. “The first-time business owner might be surprised at how stringent building codes can be when it comes to signage.”

The roughs of the floor plan and exterior are only the first step in the retail design process. In the next installment, we’ll explore how Jurgen and Trio Display designed and developed the store fixturing.