"There's too much design in too many shops," claims architect Niall McCullough. "Retailers don't use their own products to sell the shop, so they're often overdesigned."
Good retail design allows the space to provide an effective backdrop to the items on sale rather than set up an alternative distraction for the consumer.
Such design need not be expensive, as the Cuan Hanly shop in Temple Bar proves. A fashion designer, Hanly opened his own premises in Pudding Row last winter in a space designed by Doris Portmann who works with his sister, architect Orna Hanly.
It is one of the few new shops that other architects engaged in retail design praise for the quality of work. The determining feature which decided what form the rest of the space would take were the large windows on two sides.
"We decided to have free-standing units and leave the shell as it was," explains Doris Portmann. The floor and ceiling remain exposed concrete while the plasterboard walls were given a simple coat of paint. The result: an understated interior permitting the wide variety of clothing stocked by Cuan Hanly to be quickly and easily discovered by customers.
The other new outlet much admired for its design is Blu Eriu in Dublin's South William Street. Designed by Mary Donohoe, this shop serves a variety of purposes: at the front it is a florist, the main section of the space stocks a wide variety of cosmetics and perfumes, while the back of the building is given over to different spa treatment rooms.
Mary Donohoe was responsible for a number of other important, but now gone, retail outlets such as Michael Mortell's shop and Firenze.
Of her work at Blu Eriu she says: "Sometimes it's better to have a plain backdrop and let the products make the statement. At Blu Eriu, all the products are different and no one is going to be settling for a corporate image."
The site is both long and narrow and has therefore been broken up into a sequence of mini-spaces leading the consumer gradually towards the end wall, led there in part by the natural top lighting at the back of the shop. The interior is painted white, with the only distraction from the brightly coloured goods on display being a series of water tanks occupied by tropical fish.
From her experience working in this field Mary Donohoe insists that where good retail design is concerned, "the plainer and cleaner the lines, the better." It is advice other retailers could do well to note.