After seven years, Home Depot has finally finished the remodeling project on its Expo Design Center concept.
If the previous five Expos were attempts at fine-tuning the upscale designer store format, the new version, opened here this week, is its most lavish endeavor yet. Home Depot has ditched anything resembling an open warehouse feel for a department store-type setting, including low ceilings and fine furnishings.
“We’ve taken a prudent approach to the Expo concept, but this is more dramatic in terms of layout and display than anything we’ve attempted so far,” said Bryant Scott, president of the Expo division. “We took what works in other stores and created a hybrid.”
Home Depot’s Miami Expo, which opened in 1996, was the first to take a turn from the warehouse look. The Davie store, just outside Fort Lauderdale, Fla., builds on that with intimate galleries, or “lifestyle vignettes,” that showcase 47 designer baths, 25 kitchens and 10 displays of lighting fixtures.
Unlike Atlanta’s Perimeter Expo, where a variety of lamps are bunched in the same floor space, the new store uses settings that convey an appropriate mood for each style of lighting. Antique sideboards, for example, furnish a room with Tiffany lamps; a black sofa and art deco wall hangings profile a room with funky, modern light fixtures.
And the new Expos will be significantly smaller than the Perimeter store, which spans 120,000 square feet. The 88,000-square-foot Davie Expo is the new model for size and format, said Scott, who noted the company will maintain the larger existing Expos and re-fit them in phases.
For seven years, Home Depot has experimented with the merchandise and store format for Expo, which caters mostly to affluent homeowners and interior decorators.
The Davie Expo, which marks the first time Home Depot has expanded the concept in an existing market, is the first new Expo in nearly 18 months and is the launching pad for a ramped-up expansion that eventually will include 200 stores. In the fall, an Expo in nearby Boynton Beach will open next to an existing Home Depot, another first for the company.
Scott said Atlanta will get two new, improved Expos in the near future. The sites are not fixed, but one probable location is Alpharetta. Scott would not specify the second location.
Analysts have been eager for Atlanta-based Home Depot to nail down the Expo concept. The division reported the company’s highest comparable-store sales in the United States last year, Scott said. In addition, the average Expo customer has increased spending by an average of 20 percent year-over-year.
Home Depot’s conclusion that it finally has the right Expo formula is timely; other retailers are honing in on the home center concept as well.
In February, Sears launched a home interior superstore near Denver dubbed The Great Indoors, a distant cousin to the Expo concept. While the Sears version features kitchen and bath departments similar to Expo’s, The Great Indoors has an emphasis on home electronics.
“These companies have spotted a trend, and they’re reacting to it,” said Don Longo, editor of trade publication National Home Center News.
