Walking into Piccino, a kidswear shop in Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences, is like entering the pages of a children’s book.

The local design company that worked on the store interior, +Quespacio, has taken a white box and embellished it, while maintaining the sense of simplicity. While this might sound like a fairly conventional approach to fashioning a store environment, it is the use that is made of the non-white space that makes this a compelling retail landscape.

There are brightly coloured vinyls on the walls, intended to represent old furniture. These are combined with shelves and silhouettes in a parodic version of classic furniture. This would be fun in its own right, but it is the graphics, featuring cartoon-like portraits of children, as well as the butterflies that seem to rise from a cage behind the cash desk and fly up to the ceiling, that really catch the eye.

Nothing about what has been done here is complex and yet it all has an immediate appeal. The store designers have rightly judged that kidswear, by its very nature, tends to be high profile in terms of colour and therefore the decision to leave the majority of the space white and to concentrate on creating ideas with stark line drawings makes sense. 

The other point that is worth noting is the small table and chairs in a corner, aimed at giving children a rest. In the normal course of things it would be tempting to put in primary coloured chairs in an approximation of nursery furniture. Instead, what is on view is a child-sized version of a designer chair classic – this store is about creating a child’s view of an adult world. The design also has the obvious advantage that it will not involve large sums being spent should Piccino decide on a roll-out.