Visual Merchandising and Store Design | VMSD.com

(March 2007) posted on Mon Mar 26, 2007

British retailer’s wooden store in Scotland breaks new ground in eco-friendliness

By John Ryan

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Tesco, the U.K. supermarket giant, has taken another big step in its ongoing eco-program with a 50,000-square-foot store made entirely of wood. The store – which Tesco is considering a “trial” – is in Wick, a small town in Scotland’s far north with a population of a little over 8000. Go any farther north and you fall into the stretch of water that separates this country from the Orkneys and the Shetlands, islands that lie between Scotland and Iceland. It’s a long way from anywhere in particular.

Yet Tesco has chosen this remote setting for the U.K.’s first wooden supermarket, in a bid to show that real sustainability can mean more than low-energy light bulbs or a few wind turbines on the roof. There are, in fact, windmills atop this 50,000 square-foot shed. And it does have enhanced levels of natural daylight. But the real point of the shop is its timber structure, inside and out.

Timber is in conspicuously short supply in northern Scotland, which is why all of the wood used in the store comes from Finland, where sustainable forests and wood are plentiful (timber is the country’s number one export) and large wooden structures are not unknown. A number of Finnish companies specialize in providing retailers with pre-fabricated wooden store kits.

Tony Vasishta, head of development at Tesco, points out that getting the timber to Wick from Finland required substantially less energy than would have been the case had the store been built from metal and the materials transported by land. “The equivalent of 80 large truckloads worth of timber has been bought from Finland on a single boat,” he says. The wood arrived at Wick’s port, less than a mile from the store site.

Externally, the store looks like any other medium-sized Tesco branch, except that it’s clad in brown-orange plywood and there’s a triangular skylight on the roof, glazed on its north-facing aspect and running the length of the shop, blasting daylight into the interior. The skylight’s south-facing side is covered with photo-voltaic cells (solar panels), generating some of the store’s electricity needs on site.