Toronto's Depot showcases home decor

Home Channel News, March 5, 2001

Retailer's unit in Toronto includes showroom-style settings to give customers a calmer shopping experience

Shoppers who frequent Home Depot's stores have become used to being directed, by the stores' layout, into cavernous aisles of merchandise, displayed mostly on cantilever racks. Those aisles are often crowded with customers and can be cluttered by products on pallets that haven't been stocked yet.

During the past few years, however, the industry's largest retailer has been trying to place certain product categories into less imposing, more serene in-store settings. The retailer has attempted to integrate into its warehouse stores some of the display elements of its Expo Design Centers.

Last year, the company opened a store in Brampton, Ontario, that included showroom settings -- built into the side walls -- for carpeting, kitchens and baths, wallcovering, millwork and lighting. These quieter areas allow customers and employees to discuss projects without being interrupted by a forklift passing by.

Over the past several months, Depot has refined these areas, whose latest manifestations can be found at a handful of stores in West Palm Beach, Fla.; Kansas City, Mo.; and here, where a 5,000-square-foot area at the front of the store has been carved out for a carpeted, low-profile department that cross merchandises floor covering, selected kitchens, window treatments, countertops, tile, mirrors and wallpaper.

The Toronto store -- one of six of Home Depot Canada's 67 units with this department -- opened last October. Carpeting is the most prominent category displayed, which isn't surprising, given the chainwide sales growth of that category over the past few years. Perhaps more interesting is the combination of window treatments with wallcoverings that are shown in a striking display that integrates poster-size versions of the wallpaper in stock with a wider variety of smaller swatches and rolls.

Adjacent to this home decor department, and more directly in front of the store's entrance, is a reconfigured paint department. Over the service counter hangs a display that shows examples of how painted walls can interact with wood molding and wainscoting. To the side of the counter is a "Paint Solutions" display -- use of the term "solutions" is right out of Depot's Villager's Hardware format -- that showcases the store's three paint brands: CIL, Ralph Lauren's RL Paints and Behr's Premium Plus.

All stores Depot opens in Canada from here on in will get this treatment. The dealer did not reveal its plans for this department in the United States. But it is sprucing up its American stores with a new aisle signage program that was introduced Feb. 1 and will go into all new stores. The professionally rendered signs give customers more specific information about what's being stocked in each aisle.