St James Quarter is a new retail led, lifestyle district that fully integrates into and enhances Edinburgh’s City Centre providing an inspiring, attractive, and vibrant destination for locals and visitors to live, shop, eat, sleep and play.

Following a comprehensive and detailed pitch process in 2018, gpstudio were delighted to be appointed by Nuveen Real Estate to champion the retail excellence and standards through the creation of guidelines and the mentoring of tenant design proposals.

With a vision to become a world renowned, retail-led, mixed use destination with 85 retail and over 30 F&B units across 850,000 sqft of prime retail, food and leisure space our task was to help re-define retail-led mixed-use regeneration throughout the entire Galleria, befitting the vision, architecture and context.

Based on 3 key brand pillars- best in class, community and consumer experience, we set about our role to create the guidelines that would inspire incoming brands through scale, innovation and quality of its offer. As an integral part of the project team, gpstudio produced the guidelines for all in-Tenants, Kiosks and Pop-ups, managed with process (with Gardiner and Theobald ), reported to Nuveen, gave design support to many Tenants, following through to generating snagging reports and post-opening requirements, over a period of  3 years.

The result has helped position St James Quarter as one of the most exciting, forward thinking and sought after destinations for retail and leisure operators in Europe.