An office fitout is designed around how a business works. A shop fitout is designed around customers, merchandise and a fixed opening date, often inside a shopping centre's own design rules.
In the build, that means display walls that carry shelving and screens, a ceiling with far more lighting than an office, a floor that takes foot traffic from the door to the counter, and a small back of house for stock, staff and a toilet. In a centre, the design is approved against the centre's fitout guide before anyone starts on site, and the programme is worked back from the trading date.
Centre Design Guides and Drawing Approval
Most centre owners publish a design and fitout guide for their tenants. It sets out what the centre provides and what the tenant builds, which materials are allowed at the shopfront, how ceilings and lighting are to be done, and the house rules for contractors working in the centre. Some guides go as far as stating which ceiling finishes may be visible from the mall.
The tenant's designer submits drawings to the centre's design manager, usually as a preliminary design and then a final set. A typical submission includes a floor plan, a reflected ceiling plan (a plan of the ceiling drawn to line up with the floor plan below), elevations (drawings of each wall face, including the shopfront) and the services layout. Once the design is approved, the centre issues its consent, and the certifier uses the approved drawings to obtain whatever building approval the work needs. Work on site generally cannot start until both are in hand.
For us, the approved set is the document we price and build from. A change made after approval usually goes back to the centre before it is built, so we raise any question about wall positions, ceiling heights or light fittings while the drawings are still with the designer.
Several parts of a centre shop are built by others. Changes to the sprinklers, smoke detection and air conditioning are typically carried out by the centre's own contractors, because those systems serve the whole building. Shopfront glazing, roller shutters, signage and the counter joinery are other trades too, and we sequence our walls and ceiling around their visits.
Walls That Carry Shelving, Slatwall and Screens
Office walls mostly divide rooms. Apart from a screen in a meeting room or a whiteboard, they carry very little. In a shop nearly every wall is a display wall, hung with shelving on metal uprights, slatwall (grooved panels that take hooks and shelf brackets) or screens, and each of those adds weight the wall has to carry.
In a centre, the walls between tenancies usually belong to the centre and are often not built to take loads. Centre guides commonly ask for shop fittings on those walls to be self-supporting, with the weight taken down to the slab, and some do not allow cables to run inside them. Along each side of the shop we can build a new stud wall standing in front of the centre's wall. It takes the weight of the shelving and the display cabling, and the centre's wall behind it stays untouched.
These display walls are plasterboard partitions on steel studs, the same system we use in an office, with extra framing hidden inside. Where shelving uprights, slatwall or a screen bracket will be fixed, we install noggings (horizontal timber, plywood or steel members fixed between the studs) or a continuous plywood backing behind the plasterboard, so every screw lands in solid material. Slatwall suppliers screw their panels through the grooves into the framing behind and recommend close stud centres, so on a wall fully lined with slatwall we can also close up the stud spacing.
The backing has to be drawn before the walls go up. We mark the height and length of every display run on the wall elevations, because once the plasterboard is on, adding a nogging means cutting the wall open. Fixings into the centre's own slab and walls are kept to a minimum, since anything fixed there now is something to remove and patch at the shop defit when the lease ends.
Ceilings, Bulkheads and Lighting Track
An office ceiling is usually a suspended grid of tiles with flat light panels spread evenly across it, so every desk gets the same light. A shop ceiling is laid out around the merchandise. It may be a flat plasterboard ceiling with bulkheads (boxed-in sections of ceiling dropped lower than the rest) framing the display walls, or an open ceiling where the slab, ducts and pipes above are left exposed and painted out in a single colour.
Where a centre allows an open ceiling, its guide may ask for every surface above to be painted, structure and services included, for cables to run in trays or conduit, and for the walls between tenancies to be taken up to full height. Some also ask for a solid plasterboard ceiling across the front of the shop behind the shopfront. Whichever ceiling is chosen, it is hung from the building structure, and centre guides typically rule out supporting it off the centre's own bulkheads, ductwork or pipes.
The energy rules in the building code allow a shop far more lighting power per square metre than an office. Under NCC 2022, the edition still in force in NSW, the maximum for a retail space is 14 watts per square metre, against 4.5 for an office lit for desk work. A scheme that uses that allowance needs more fittings, lighting track for adjustable spotlights over the display walls, and more circuits.
The code also asks for display lighting to be switched separately from general lighting, with window display lighting separate again, and centres often want the shopfront lights on a time clock set to centre hours. On site that means separate circuits for the general lighting, the display track, the window and the shopfront, laid out by the electrician from the same drawings.
All of this is set out from the reflected ceiling plan, which shows every light, track run, bulkhead, sprinkler head, grille and access panel in the ceiling. Track over a display wall has to line up with the shelving it lights, so we check the ceiling plan against the wall elevations before any ceiling framing goes up.
Back of House: Stockroom, Staff Room and Toilet
An office spreads its support rooms through the floor. A shop pushes them to the back, behind a wall that separates the sales floor from the stockroom, a staff room and usually a toilet. Centre guides commonly ask for that wall to run full height to the ceiling, so the back of house is hidden from the shop floor, and some ask for every door leading into it to have a self-closer.
Those doors are usually lockable as well, because the stock is kept behind them. In a centre the rear door to the service corridor is normally the centre's door and stays as it is, and where that door is also an exit, the stockroom layout keeps the route to it clear of stock. Whether any wall or door in the back of house needs a fire rating depends on the building and its fire engineering, and we confirm that with the certifier before the door sets are ordered.
Stockroom shelving often runs close to the ceiling. Where it fixes to the walls we add backing the same way as on the sales floor, and the top shelves are kept clear of the sprinkler heads, which some centre guides call out directly. The plumbing is planned around what the centre provides, which can be as little as one cold water point and one drainage point, so the toilet, the staff sink and any cleaner's sink are grouped close to them.
Some shops also need an enclosed room off the sales floor, such as a fitting room or a pharmacy consultation room. We frame those at the same time as the back of house walls, while the ceiling above is still open.
Floors at the Shopfront Line and the Counter
Offices are mostly carpeted, with hard flooring in the kitchen and at the entry. A shop floor takes every customer from the door to the counter and back, as well as stock trolleys from the back of house, so it is usually a hard finish such as tile, stone, timber or polished concrete. Centre guides often call for durable finishes at the entry, and some ask for a slip resistance test certificate for the floor before the shop can open.
Centre tenancies are commonly handed over with the slab set down below the mall floor. This set-down leaves room for the tenant's floor to be built up, so the finished shop floor meets the mall at the lease line (the boundary of the tenancy at the shopfront) without a step.
We check the depth of the set-down on site before deciding how to build it up, then lay a levelling screed (a bed of sand and cement) to the height the chosen finish needs. Where the shop floor meets the mall, centre guides commonly ask for a flush metal strip, installed before the finish on either side.
Heavy items such as a safe or a large freestanding display usually have to be shown on the drawings submitted to the centre, so the slab loading can be checked. The counter position is settled early too. It decides where we bring power and data up for the till and payment terminal, which on an island counter usually means a core hole through the slab, and in a centre each core typically needs a slab scan by a structural engineer and the centre's approval first.
Access guidance based on AS 1428.2 recommends a lowered section of counter with knee space beneath it, so a customer in a wheelchair can be served face to face. We keep the floor in front of that section flat and clear, and run power and data to it so the payment terminal can sit there.
A Programme Set by the Trading Date
A shop in a centre usually has a fitout period and a date to open for trade fixed before work starts, and centre guides typically ask for a construction programme showing the works finish inside that period. We write the programme backwards from the trading date.
A centre may not allow stock in until the building works are complete, and centre management commonly inspects the shop before it opens, with major defects fixed before it is cleared to trade. The shelves are stocked in that same window, so we set our handover date to leave room for both.
Inside a centre, noisy work such as drilling, cutting and coring is generally kept out of trading hours, which puts the demolition and slab work into the hours before or after the centre is open. Major deliveries are arranged in advance with centre management for a time and an unloading point they nominate.
While the works run, the shopfront is closed off with hoarding (a temporary wall across the front, often installed by the centre's contractor), and building waste leaves in our own bins rather than the centre's. A shop on a high street works without a centre's house rules, though the wall, ceiling, floor and back of house items above apply in the same way.
Where we build the whole shop as one job, the same way we run a complete office fitout from the approved drawings to handover, the centre's contractors and the other trades are booked into our programme at the stage their work needs. We can also build a single part of a shop, such as the display walls, the back of house or the ceiling.
When we price a shop fitout, we mark every display wall and counter position on the approved drawings first, so the wall backing and the slab approvals are in the programme before work starts.
📞 Call us on 1300 60 93 93