Other than as the final stop on a Caledonian distillery tour, it’s not often that whisky takes centre stage in a retail context. The 600 sq ft Whisky Shop in Manchester shows what’s possible however.

The recently opened store on Exchange Street, designed by Gpstudio, demonstrates how a single niche category can be made to work as a retail proposition, rather than something that would normally be found buried towards the back of ‘booze alley’, the final aisle before heading for the checkouts in most supermarkets.

Here shoppers can spend a few minutes looking at everything from bourbon to malt all displayed within a high-gloss interior that features black walls and back-lit shelves. The effect is to make a fashionable bar, or something close to it, from a shop. The manner in which the visual merchandising has been undertaken, with everything shown off around the perimeter, adds to the effect.

It also services to emphasise the variety of shapes and sizes on offer as far as whisky bottles are concerned.

And to reinforce this variety, The Whisky Shop has grouped bottles of the same coloured glass together - green with green, clear with clear, and so on.

The finish and execution make this shop the sort of place that whisky lovers, and even those for whom the water of life holds little appeal, will stop and take a look at. The simple principle of lighting the stock and not the shop is what underpins this interior - the sort of approach normally reserved for fashion merchandising.

It makes everything that is on display feel precious, which is surely what the average whisky distiller would hope for.