Berry Bros. & Rudd's Geordie Willis takes us inside The Spirits Shop

This month, Walpole member and historic wine and spirit merchant Berry Bros. & Rudd opened the doors to its latest retail space, The Spirits Shop. With views out towards the crenelated Tudor towers of St James's Palace, The Spirits Shop occupies a corner plot between the company's two existing properties: its Wine Shop at 63 Pall Mall and its headquarters at No. 3 St James's, a space Berry Bros. & Rudd has occupied since it was established in 1698. 

While today the company might best be known for its exceptional wine curation, this new space is a physical reminder and expression of its long-standing expertise with spirits. Berry Bros. & Rudd created the Cutty Sark brand in 1923 (which would go on to be wildly popular in the US), and has been an independent whisky bottler for more than a century. Recently, the company worked with Dr David Clutton, the only man in the world with a PHD in gin, to launch its house No. 3 London Dry Gin and took a stake in the Cotswolds Distillery. 

The Spirits Shop takes this pedigree and in-house knowledge in spirits learnt over the centuries as a starting point, and expands upon it exponentially. The result are expertly curated selections of not just whisky and gin from around the world, as well as exclusives, but also tequila, cognac, vodka and many other alcoholic libations in between – not to mention a specific section for low- and no-alcohol spirits. There's also a dedicated space for launches and events for those who wish to mingle with like-minded collectors or who want to learn more about their favourite spirits, as well as a dedicated rarities room, where illuminated bottles entice collectors while they browse. In short, whether it's a seasoned spirit expert or a person who's just starting out in the genre walking through the door, there's a bottle (or five) to suit.

Here, we talk to Geordie Willis, the longstanding Creative Director & Brand Experience Director of Berry Bros & Rudd (pictured, above), about his favourite elements of the new shop, what its opening means for the company, and how he leant on 325 years of history to create a space fit for the future.

Walpole: What is your history with the Berry Bros. & Rudd?

Geordie Willis: I've worked at Berry Bros. & Rudd for about 25 years now. I am part of the Berry family, but my mother and father never worked for the company, so I'm in the rare position that I'm in a family business with no other family members! I joined in the cellars back in the early 2000s and, since then, I have worked for the company in Asia and the US. For the past six years, I have served as Berry Bros. & Rudd's Creative Director & Brand Experiences Director.

It feels like The Spirits Shop is a real expression of both aspects of your role. Why was it important for the brand to create this new retail space for customers?

Berry Bros. & Rudd has been in the experiential retail world for much longer than perhaps we'd even realised ourselves. We've had customers come here to dine upstairs for about a century, and about 20 years ago we opened our events and experiences business in our dedicated space downstairs, within which we host around 1000 events a year. Experiences are an important part of the relationship we have with our customers – if you are selling wine and spirits, the physical transaction of selling is only a part of the relationship – sometimes it's just as important to simply open a bottle with them or offer interactive education about a particular type of spirit, but we didn't have a dedicated space for that.

At the same time, we have owned this corner site for 325 years. We've always known it's the missing piece in the jigsaw for our offering here in St James's, and we have looked at various ideas for the space over the years from a boutique hotel to a wine bar to a coffee house (we started as a coffee merchant). It became vacant from its tenent while the spirits part of our business was booming. Suddenly, it became a perfect storm where those two elements came together and the idea of a dedicated Spirits Shop linked to our Wine Shop via a tasting and events space made a lot of sense.

What was the thinking behind linking the two spaces by a tasting area?

As we already had the Wine Shop on Pall Mall, we felt it would only be worth having the Spirits Shop if we could connect the two spaces. It would be odd if a customer had to queue up to buy a bottle of Claret in the Wine Shop and pay before heading outside to the shop next door to get their bottle of No.3 Gin to go with. So when we got permission to knock the wall through between the two, we were delighted because it really unlocked the project.

We also knew that having the space with the tasting table would be essential to use for activations and producer masterclasses. Again, it was about building communities in a way that we've seen happen across the rest of the site when we have events. 

Today Berry Bros. & Rudd is perhaps best know for its wine offering. What is the company's history with spirits?

We actually have a long history of spirits. We were one of the original independent bottlers of whisky back in the 19th century. In the early 20th, century, our whisky was on board the RMS Titanic on the way to the US heading for the Metropolitan Club in New York – in fact, our yellow label whisky, Cutty Sark, became a huge brand in the 1960s and 1970s in America. More recently, we introduced our No.3 Gin, created by Dr David Clutton, the only man to hold a PhD in gin.

How did you approach the design of the Spirits Shop?

We wanted to use the space in a way that would encourage people inside. Yes, it's a retail store, but it's also a different door into the brand. The front door of our historic store at 3 St James's is quite austere and I've watched people be a little intimidated to walk across the threshold. What we wanted with new space was for the design to be welcoming both outside and in, as well as being a positive reflection of our history.

With the weight of 325 years of history on your shoulders, how do you do that?

We worked with Mowat & Company on the look and feel of the space, an interior studio we've had a relationship with for about a decade. This was a conversation I had with the founder of the firm, Alex, when we were starting in on the project; how do we strike that balance of being progressive, but also being very mindful of the past? How do we avoid a Disney-fied version of the original shop? We decided one of the key ways to demonstrate this balance was to elevate our history quite literally. So you'll see that in that space, we have casks from a distillery on the roof. I I love the barrel staves – it's a bit like being underneath the dinosaur skeleton in the National History Museum.

Then we have these these extraordinary oak floors beneath your feet, which will get better over time – rather than trying to recreate the historic floors next door. We wanted to create a space that 'wears in' rather than 'wears out'. We designed the space with the thought that it should look better in 30 years time than it does now.

What's an element of the space you think is particularly unique?

I think that our placement of our Armagnac right by the tills is quite fun because Berry Bros & Rudd's history with that spirit goes all the way back to the 1890s. When people come in looking for something vintage to celebrate a specific birth or anniversary year, they might think of wine, but the problem with wine is that as it gets older it gets either unbelievably expensive or not very good. Whereas Armagnac, which is released every year, is not only very good value, but also retains its quality exceptionally well.

Also our thought was that we wanted the behind-the-scenes areas to be just as inviting as the more public areas. We have a beautiful consultancy room underground, which was a real learning from our historic space as we didn't have an easily accessible area to take our customers who wanted to have more in-depth conversations abut, say, building a spirits collection. On top of this, away from the main shop floor, we have our Spirits Reserve Room, which offers a tranquil environment to explore some of the world’s finest and rarest spirits, and a rather wonderful WC for customers with lots of memories from our history as a spirit merchant. I wanted to make sure that if a customer ever does wander in the wrong direction that they're still wowed by whatever they come across – not like they've gone behind the velvet curtain in The Wizard of Oz.

What spirits are on offer in the shop? What was the thought behind the buy?

The product that we have in this shop is a combination of research and what we have learned from our previous buy in 63 Pall Mall – however, in there we only had one wall of spirits and here we have an entire shop. To fill it, we've taken on board what our spirits customers have said to us over the last seven years, and built upon that with the help of an expanded spirits team. We tasked them with making sure there is stuff in the shop that is really, genuinely exciting and rare – things even the most enthusiastic spirits customers will have never seen before.

We've also got a dedicated low- and no-alcohol section in the mix, which, even five years or so ago, would have been quite unusual. But the way we see it is that is that if if people are looking for it and we have the opportunity to curate a collection of the very best examples of the genre, then that's something we should be offering.

Was it exciting to have a new space where you could display product differently to your other spaces?

Yes, and I love how plentiful the bottles are in the Spirits Shop. When you're looking at our Wine Shop, the layout is very smart, quite uniform. The lovely thing about this space is that there are so many colours and shapes and sizes of vessel on display – and there's so much to learn from all their labels. It's more like being in a bookshop.

The Spirits Shop at Berry Bros. & Rudd is now open at No. 1 St James's Street, London, SW1Y 5HZ. bbr.com