PRINT THIS STORY:

CHANGE TEXT SIZE:

SMITH & HAWKEN’S NEW STORE PROMOTES ‘DESIGNER’ YARDS

By Meredith Mannino

Clearly, it takes more than a pitchfork to create a beautiful yard, just as it takes more than a broom to make a lovely home, Smith & Hawken reasons. To that end, this purveyor of high-end garden and yard tools, plants, and outdoor furniture and accessories has rolled out a new store design it calls Renaissance. This new format encourages customers to give as much thought to their yards as they give to their homes.

“We wanted a space that our customers can come in to relax, sit down and consider how they want to construct their outdoor living space,” said Andrew Wadhams, Smith & Hawken’s senior vice president of retail.

This spring the first two Renaissance stores opened, one in Mill Valley, Calif., and the other in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. There are four more Renaissance stores currently in the pipeline, and the company plans to convert all 58 existing Smith & Hawken units, many of which are housed in historic buildings, to the new format over the next five years. The company isn’t saying how much it will spend on the program. The Renaissance stores will all measure at least 10,000 square feet, double the size of the company’s regular stores. They will also feature fountains or specially crafted water structures to help promote a sense of calm and contribute to the outdoorsy feel.

The 10,000-square-foot Mill Valley store opened in May at Strawberry Village, an open-air center near Smith & Hawken’s Novato, Calif., hometown. It features a central skylight illuminating a plant room, porcelain flooring and an actual 17th-century marble fountain. Besides the customary Smith & Hawken plant-potting and tool-sharpening services, the Renaissance stores offer design consultation, through which customers get help choosing chair-cushion fabrics, lighting, table umbrellas and the like to fashion their ideal outdoor setting.

Customers are invited to browse teak outdoor furniture, garden trellises and pavilions, lights, plants and planters, fountains and other outdoors and gardening items. It is not that the new stores offer a wider range of merchandise than the original ones, just a more comfortable space in which to admire it.

“Each room is designed to inspire outdoor living at its fullest potential,” said Wadhams. “These new stores will present products in lifestyle environments and settings, allowing customers to better visualize how Smith & Hawken fits into their own outdoor space, whether large or small.”

The Palm Beach Gardens store’s opening marks the retailer’s first physical foray into Florida. Smith & Hawken’s reputation preceded it, however, because the company’s catalog sales are strong there. “Floridians are able to spend more time outdoors than just about anywhere else in the country,” Wadhams said. “This makes Florida a natural fit for us, as Smith & Hawken products are designed to make any outdoor space extraordinary, whether it’s poolside, by the grill, on the patio or in the garden.”

The store, located at the Downtown at the Gardens, a 338,100-square-foot, luxury open-air center, is bigger than the California store, at 11,000 square feet. The center’s prosperous market is a perfect setting, says Ashley Ostroff, director of marketing at Menin Development Cos., the center’s owner and developer.

“Smith & Hawken has a unique product line that makes their stores so appealing in a sophisticated market,” said Ostroff. “With over 15,000 new homes in Palm Beach Gardens, there is no better place to sell luxury outdoor furniture.” (Those homes are all valued at between $500,000 and $20 million, she says.)

Smith & Hawken commissioned McCall Design Group, a San Francisco-based architecture firm, to carry out the redesign. Wadhams cites McCall’s reputation for “integrating environment, architecture and product.” The retailer and McCall, which has done work for W Hotels and fashion designer Kate Spade, concluded that light, color and water were key elements for the garden store milieu.

“We wanted to create an environment full of light that would offset the merchandise,” said Anja Rohde Albertson, a McCall senior associate and design director for Smith & Hawken projects. Teaming up with a lighting designer, Albertson selected metal halide illumination for its bright and natural-looking light — great for the plants and greenery that line the Smith & Hawken stores, she says. The lush, aromatic plant areas within the Renaissance stores create a virtual garden.

For the color tones, Albertson selected a neutral palette of cream and taupe. The store fixtures are made of white and golden oak for a rustic appearance that complements the signature Smith & Hawken teak furniture. A zinc finish that resembles outdoor plant boxes was used for the checkout counters.

Several of the display fixtures have a rust-colored finish that lends a weathered look. Peruvian travertine and porcelain tile were selected for the flooring. Both materials are dense, hard, stain-resistant and nonporous. That’s important for Smith & Hawken stores, where so much soil, plant material and water are hitting the floors constantly. Smith & Hawken plans to open more stores in Florida, and by next spring it will build new shops in Manhattan Beach, Calif., Cleveland and Las Vegas. Smith & Hawken will seek other suitable markets based on the success of those stores.

Smith & Hawken was founded in 1979 when John Jeavons, an organic gardener, prevailed upon his entrepreneurial and environmentally aware friends David Smith and Paul Hawken to import his favorite hand-forged gardening tools from Britain. Hawken and Smith began importing high-quality implements that were unavailable in the U.S. and sold them by catalog. The two opened their first store in 1982.

The founders no longer run the business. In 2004 The Scotts Miracle-Gro Co., a publicly traded lawn and garden business, acquired it. Smith & Hawken accounted for 7 percent of Scotts’ $2.3 billion in net sales for fiscal 2005, ended Sept. 30. Smith & Hawken also distributes its products online and at Target stores.

These are good times for those catering to designer yards, says Su Lok, a Scotts Miracle-Gro spokeswoman. “We’re seeing more Americans,” she said, “spending money to develop outdoor space.”