The new-look Dobbies garden centre in Aberdeen is sustainable and modern, with a seamless mixed-product offer.

Aberdeen is a bit like Norwich. In terms of its relations to other major towns, it is out on its own, at least in UK terms, and getting there will always involve going the extra mile (or about 400, if you happen to fly in a straight line from London).

It also happens, like Norwich, to dominate its hinterland, with all those around it regarding it as the big city. In the popular imagination oil remains Aberdeen’s principal raison d’être and this is certainly a major part of its make-up, but Aberdeenshire is a rich agricultural part of the UK with a generally affluent population.

All of which means that for retailers this should be a relatively attractive proposition - although it also means shipping goods to a store will probably cost a little extra. Unless, that is, you are a retailer with a Scottish heritage and a head office north of the border.

Tesco-owned garden centre operator Dobbies falls into this category. Based in Edinburgh, Aberdeen is a shortish hop away from the Scottish capital (well, a couple of hours by road anyway) and although it is the most far-flung Scottish outpost, it is still potentially a very lucrative location.

Country living

It is perhaps for these reasons that two weeks ago Dobbies opened a new garden centre just outside the city with an internal net size of 47,000 sq ft and an external area about one and a half times this size.

The fact that there is a roughly 60/40 split of the space between outdoors and indoors in this centre indicates the oddity that is the modern garden centre. Dobbies chief executive James Barnes says that garden centres are increasingly about “bringing the outdoors indoors and taking the indoors outdoors”. You know what he means, of course, but there is a sense that this is something of a glib marketing mantra, one that trips lightly off the tongue.

Nonetheless, approaching this store from the car park, it is the outdoors that dominates with the structure covered in sustainable-looking wood cladding. This creates the impression that Dobbies’ new Aberdeen store has taken the environment as a major element for consideration.

This proves to be the case when Barnes says that the store, with architecture by local practice Mills Design, is the most sustainable Dobbies to date and the outsize log cabin appearance is intended to foster that impression.

Step inside and the sustainable credentials are writ somewhat larger by the timber frame. This is genuinely more sustainable than the usual tin shed with steel supports that tends to characterise garden centre architecture and there is a sense that you have strayed into one of those wood-framed supermarkets that have been a feature of store design over the past couple of years.

However, the impression does not last long, for the sheer diversity of the product offer and the many different departments within this space immediately demand attention. One of the problems facing the contemporary garden centre owner is the requirement to put everything from a butchers, a deli, a baker and then a range of garden furniture alongside unrelated items such as children’s toys and perhaps tropical fish. This is before mentioning that “horticulture is at the heart of the business”, as Barnes remarks.

The result, in many locations, can be a bit of a mess - an undercover space where disparate items have been yoked together with little seeming rationale, other than a desire to display as much as possible. And then, as if to justify the whole arrangement, there are acres of pot plants and small trees all waiting outside - perhaps intended to signal that you are still in a garden centre.

No such danger here. Following a pitch by a number of design agencies, Barnes selected London-based outfit Edge Architecture + Design, to create the interior for the store.

The outcome is a store that is indeed widely diverse in terms of product offer, but which feels like an integrated whole. And curiously, this is not done by the usual method of deciding on a particular type of signage and then cascading it out across the space. Instead, there are very well-defined product areas with a strong emphasis in the fresh food and bakery area on provenance.

There is a gradual shift in tone as you move around the store, depending upon the area being visited, but it is subtle. Approach the farm foodhall and restaurant, for instance, and this is achieved by the simple expedient of changing the stain colour used on the wood cladding from light to dark. The effect is to make you register that this is a different part of the store, but without jarring against the rest of the interior.

A similar design strategy is used across the store, where gentle changes of tone indicate that you have wandered into, say, “Indoor Living” (curious, as most people do exactly this you might think - but again, you know what is intended), or the large graphic stating “Dobbies For A Greener World” - which is where the composters are located. And an overhead sign on a block of wood states “Conservatory Living”, raising the question why you might wish to do this, but in terms of visibility and in-store navigation, it is effective and not over-shouty. There’s even a deep blue cave-like area where fish tanks with brightly coloured tropical fish are presumably supposed to be an adjunct to the “Indoor Living”. But strangely, it all works together and appears totally natural.

Food for thought

However, pride of place in this store, has to be fresh food. Standards are high, whether it is the butcher, which has product visual merchandising of the kind that would give Whole Foods Market in Kensington a run for its money, or the bakery, which has cornered the market in rustic wicker baskets to present Danish pastries, cupcakes et al.

The butcher is in fact a franchise, but everything else in this area is undertaken by Dobbies and in case you forget you are in Scotland, there is a malt whisky tasting station in the middle of the area, complete with tartan tablecloth.

There are also, ahem, plants, household plants, positioned close to the door that leads out to the unheated, but covered, part of the store, where the semi-hardy plants are located. From there a progress can finally be made into the open air, where the most frost-resistant plants are to be found in rows, waiting for the end of the Scottish winter.

There are a total of 25 Dobbies garden centres in the UK but plans are in place for up to 100 stores.

This is the first of a new breed, representing an investment of £8.1m, and it looks well put together. On opening day, two Fridays ago, it was cold and wet with the remnants of the previous week’s snow still on the ground. Yet within an hour of opening, the sun had come out, the car park was rammed and visitors were queuing to enjoy the local produce in the chichi cafe that offers shoppers a break from inspecting the hardy perennials and “indoor aquatics” (fish).

Naturally the opening had been well flagged and the crowds had turned out in response, but it could not be expected to trade at this level every day.

However, it should do well as much for its potential as a quasi-leisure destination as for its status as a garden centre. It also manages to stay just the right side of twee - something many garden centres signally fail to achieve.

Aberdeen has, apparently, won the gong for the Royal Horticultural Society’s Britain in Bloom 10 times, indicating perhaps that green fingers are endemic in this part of the world. The arrival of a new-look Dobbies should give Aberdonians the chance to flex them even more vigorously.