Re: Re: Clerys

Also just an image of the flooring I couldn’t find earlier. An excellent choice of design and colouring:

This flooring in Clerys is very distinctive and memorable. It’s quite rare in any retailing space to get dark timber flooring, and less still that it be complemented by a suitably matching walkway design. The combination Clerys went for looks very sophisticated in being modern but also subtly Edwardian in character.
So refreshing in contrast with the hideous beech effect covering pasted down across a certain other department store and many other retail outlets in the city.

Very interesting interview below with Galen Weston, owner of Brown Thomas (and Selfridges and many others) in last week’s The Sunday Business Post. Opening a Brown Thomas north of the Liffey seems to be a medium term aim for the company – it’d be great if O’Connell Street could scoop it. Suggestions of Clerys being bought out are made, given the store is now more vunerable to takeover.
The biggest relevation that Arnotts are proposing to spend €700 billion on their revamp! 😀

Weston’s way to the top
15 October 2006 By Simon Carswell

The Brown Thomas head office at the top of its flagship building on Dublin’s Grafton Street is quiet but busy. From here, you can almost see the northside of the city.

It’s a view that Brown Thomas owner, Canadian billionaire Galen Weston, and his management team at the country’s leading luxury department chain must be considering more and more these days. This is the perfect vantage point from which to plan a full-scale retail invasion of the O’Connell Street-Henry Street area of the city’s northside.

It’s a part of Dublin ripe for an incursion. This part of town competes with the Grafton Street area for the ever-growing number of well-off shoppers with bulging wallets. Weston has been watching with great interest what is happening north of his Irish retail headquarters and, in particular, how his retail rivals, Arnotts and Clerys, are performing.

Weston’s day-to-day schedule is calculated with military precision. He is in Ireland for a flying visit, but managed to squeeze in about 30 minutes to speak exclusively to The Sunday Business Post, his first interview with an Irish newspaper in years.

Before the 4pm interview, he attended a management meeting to plan the continued upgrading of the Brown Thomas stores – Weston has four in Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick (as well as two BT2 outlets) – and he poses for pictures during an eight-minute photoshoot on the Grafton Street shop floor.

Weston must be on his way to Dublin Airport by 4.30pm – I am told – if his private jet is to make its landing slot in London where he owns another flagship store, in the main shopping thoroughfare of Oxford Street. The store is Selfridges.

He later proudly describes the shop as ‘‘one of the top three stores of its kind in the world’’. ‘Top’ is a word that Weston can quite legitimately use to describe most of his businesses, whether they’re in Britain, Ireland or Canada.

But today, Weston’s focus is firmly fixed on Brown Thomas, the retailer that occupies the front line on the Irish luxury retail battlefield. Weston is polite, immaculately dressed and exudes the confidence that you would expect from someone who is the second-wealthiest man in Canada and one of the richest shopkeepers in the world.

Returning to the stylish office of Brown Thomas chief executive Dalton Philips, Weston prefers not to take his lieutenant’s chair, plumping instead for the guest side of the desk.

Brown Thomas has been located on the western side of Grafton Street for 11 years now, ever since Weston amalgamated BT and Switzers.

Weston says the deal – in which Marks & Spencer paid