Ars Gratia Pecuniae

Every year at this time, the nation's retailers hope that their cash registers will start ringing up glad tidings of heavy sales. But how to make those expectations come true? One way is to turn big department stores into shoppers' lures--places where customers will go to find one item, then linger to buy others. That takes design, and one man with the kind of designing eye that merchants appreciate is a 36-year-old architect-artist named Kenneth Walker. He is something of an iconoclast, merrily discarding what he calls "formula work--all those fancy chandeliers and moldings" in favor of fresher approaches.

His design for Burdine's huge department store in Clearwater, Fla., for example, is a mixture of stark Bauhaus and glinting jewelry shop. The furnishings are so dark--charcoal-gray carpets, walls and ceilings--that shoppers focus exclusively on the carefully lighted merchandise. The scheme works too. Sales are booming, reports Burdine's chairman, Melvin Jacobs. Walker puts the message another way in the stenciled words on one of the paintings he does on the side: ARS GRATIA PECUNIAE--art for the sake of money.

Sharp Cutbacks. He obviously likes both. A graduate of the Harvard architectural school, in 1970 he grandly opened the Kenneth Walker Design Group--consisting of himself--to do graphics and interior projects. To get more work, he merged two years later with the established architectural office of the Grad Partnership, forming Walker/Grad Inc. By then, however, the recession was causing such sharp cutbacks in new construction that few jobs were to be had. But Walker noticed that retailers kept on building new stores and remodeling old ones. He broke into the then staid field by refurbishing the shoe department of the Henri Bendel store in Manhattan. The result was so bright and tasteful that other merchants noticed it, and Walker suddenly found himself in demand. He now employs 35 people and does more than $15 million worth of store projects a year. In the U.S., his chief clients are various divisions of Federated Department Stores, the nation's largest department-store chain; he has also done jobs in Venezuela, Canada and Puerto Rico.

Bombarding Shoppers. Walker begins by studying a store to see what departments should be close together--for instance, jewelry and leather goods, which appeal to high spenders. Then he figures out how people should walk through a given floor. To influence them, he often replaces the conventional long lines of counters with displays that jut into the corridors. These "islands" give shoppers a visual sample of the goods for sale just around the corner. The aim is to bombard customers with subtle enticements to explore the store--and buy more goods. When successful, says Walker, "shopping becomes entertainment, and the store becomes both theater and selling machine."

His most dramatic new design is for another Burdine's, this one in Sarasota, Fla. It features a great central skylight because "people are attracted to light," says Walker, and uses symbols as signs to mark the various departments. Men's wear can be found behind a photomontage depicting a male fantasy: it shows a locomotive rushing toward a female mannequin tied to the railroad tracks, with a leering villain near by; male customers can imagine themselves coming to the rescue. Sportswear is sold beside a lifelike flock of artificial sheep that supposedly connote country life. All this may seem to be thin whimsy. But Store Manager Charles Fletcher happily calls the design "special, vibrant, an outstanding success"--meaning that it causes customers to spend.

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