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Grateful Dead tapestries. Lava lamps. The distinctive orange inspired by Flamin’ Hot Cheetos dust painted indiscriminately on walls.
Until now, these were the markings of marijuana dispensaries, dripping with 1960s hippie nostalgia and the musings of the stereotypical stoner, and it’s high time for the cannabis aesthetic to get a refresh, cannabis entrepreneurs say.
Dispensaries and design studios are playing a game of catch up, as cannabis legalization has become more widespread across the United States in recent years. Many entrepreneurs want to strip the plant of any past negative associations, opening the door to reach new types of customers. This moment creates an opportunity to tell a brand’s story from scratch, and it’s leading to a revolution in how spaces for cannabis consumption and retail are being presented. Think less weed-dealer-core, and more high-end boutique or fancy cocktail lounge.
“The retail environments for cannabis don’t match the money people are spending on it, nor do they match the diversity of the consumers,” said Kim Myles, the co-founder of MylesMoore, a design firm that revamps the interiors of mom-and-pop cannabis dispensaries across the country. “It’s a quality plant. Going into a dispensary should be a quality experience. There’s no way we are going to overcome the stigma it has if we don’t change the touch point for the consumer.”
Ms. Myles, who is based in Jersey City, launched her firm earlier this year after she worked her way up from bud-tender to assistant manager at a dispensary. She also boasts her cannabis design expertise on her show, “High Design,” which airs on Discovery+.
On one recent makeover, Ms. Myles collaborated with a local florist to create a massive floral installation with the brand logo in the waiting room of a dispensary in Denver. It made for the perfect Instagrammable moment, but also “we were giving the business a tangible connection to the rest of artistic and creative community that they live with,” Ms. Myles said.
There’s plenty of reason to invest in the design of cannabis spaces. In the United States, it’s a multibillion-dollar industry that’s yet to hit its peak. This month, President Biden pardoned thousands of people convicted of federal charges for marijuana possession. Last year, New York and several other states legalized recreational marijuana, a trajectory that most Americans agree with, a 2021 Pew survey found. In 2020 alone, legal cannabis sales in the United States were upward of $17.5 billion, and New York has estimated that the industry could create as many as 60,000 new jobs in the state.
Andrés Rigal and Taylor Bazley, the owners of Green Qween, a shop in Los Angeles focused on increasing visibility for L.G.B.T.Q. and other marginalized people in the cannabis industry, wanted the design of their store to reflect their values.
“I felt it was important to create a space that was elevated and creative and didn’t feel like a dispensary. That’s what Green Qween is — it doesn’t fit in the industry as we see it,” Mr. Rigal said. “When you walk into the store, you’ll see that this is a very diverse and eclectic space. Most other dispensaries do very dark, masculine colors.”
The Art Deco building that Green Qween occupies was originally built as a bank in the 1930s. Inside, the theme continues with colorful arched display cases showing off the shop’s products, many of which are from women and L.G.B.T.Q.-run brands. It looks like a museum display case, which Mr. Bazley said was intentional. “It signals to the consumers that this is a place to look and learn. A lot of those brands are very new, and we’re hoping to create fun moments of consumer discovery,” he said.
There’s also an eye-catching disco ball nested in the back wall, which Mr. Rigal called “the cherry on top of a queer space because it speaks to so much to our culture.” (The early underground Disco scene of the 1970s was pioneered by Black, Latino and L.G.B.T.Q. people, and many of those parties had disco balls because they couldn’t afford high-end lighting. Disco balls have been a part of queer nightlife ever since.)
Celebrities have also started to get in on the action. The rapper and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” star Ice-T announced that he’s opening a 5,000-square-foot dispensary in Jersey City this fall.
In May, the actor Woody Harrelson launched the Woods, a roughly 7,000-square-foot dispensary and lounge, with Bill Maher and other business partners. The Woods, which is in West Hollywood, has 13-foot-tall fiddle-leaf fig trees, a koi pond so large that a person could swim in it and a tropical garden, which the designer Thomas Schoos said he spent 15 years curating.
“The part that drew me to this place is the outdoor area … the koi pond, the plants, fauna and greenery make you feel like you are in the woods or the jungle,” Mr. Harrelson said in an email. “I am hoping to reach people from every walk of life and anyone who enjoys herb. The Woods is for everyone from older folks to the young ones, business people to hippies, punk to country to rap, and rock and roll.”
Part of the brand’s mission, as Mr. Harrelson put it, is to help people “appreciate the plant in its most natural setting,” and the dispensary’s earthy ambience stuffed with nods to mother nature in every corner certainly emphasizes that goal.
But one design challenge that came up was ensuring that the space felt cohesive. The alcohol and cannabis consumption areas, per California law, had to be separate. So Mr. Schoos decided to put a floor-to-ceiling glass partition in between the two, to create a physical separation but still keep a visual connection. “You feel in proxy to it, and there’s something really playful about it at the same time,” Mr. Schoos said.
For designers in the cannabis retail space, it’s not easy keeping up with rules that are constantly changing and dependent on the location. Another common regulatory challenge is that some regions don’t allow cannabis products to be visible from the street.
“With frosted windows, where you don’t know what’s behind it, what are the chances that your customer’s even going to take the first step into it?” said Randy Simmen, the head designer at SevenPoint Interiors, which specializes in cannabis retail interiors and is based in Woodbridge, Ontario. “There’s so many rules and regulations to abide by that you don’t normally see in traditional retail that from a design perspective we have to get clever about.”
Desmond Chan, the creative director at SevenPoint Interiors, compared the state of cannabis retail to liquor stores just after Prohibition. “No product on the floor. They had menus, and you had to fill out a form with what you wanted, then an employee went and grabbed it from the back. It’s almost the exact same template being used for cannabis right now,” Mr. Chan said. “We’re getting creative to work around the current regulations, and hopefully that sets the tone for new regulations going forward.”
Wyllow, another weed store in Los Angeles, is no larger than the size of a bodega at 350 square feet. One of the brand’s main goals is to create a multi-sensory shopping experience; there’s custom-engineered, ambient Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or A.S.M.R., sounds playing, a cannabis terpene scent installation and custom LED-lighting that evolves from day to night.
The idea behind the elaborate setup is to make people comfortable and spark their curiosity, inspiring them to open up about what they’re looking for. “Customers become so enamored with the space that they tend to share more details about their life, which allows us to further identify plant medicine or products that are best suited for their needs,” said Camille Roistacher, the dispensary’s founder. A customer isn’t likely to feel comfortable sharing that they could use something to help with their anxiety over the blasting-loud music at a Weed World truck, but they just might at a setting like Wyllow.
In Canada, where the federal government legalized weed in 2018, those in the industry have had a head start in aestheticizing dispensaries.
Superette, which has six locations in Ottawa and Toronto, is a playful brand that borrows elements from quotidian retail environments.
One of the locations is mirrored after an Italian deli, and it has green and white checkerboard flooring, deli cases and even tomato cans and olive oil canisters as props. Another is modeled after a 1960s supermarket, and the Superette team has a Blockbuster video store themed dispensary in the works.
Drummond Munro, Superette’s chief brand officer, said that the brand is intentionally aiming not to be “revolutionary” or “innovative.”
“We’ve started choosing themes and aesthetics for the stores that already fit within the existing retail landscape,” Mr. Munro said. “We thought, how do we make people feel as familiar with our stores as possible? So we decided to just give them elements they already know how to interact with.”
While more sophisticated cannabis retail spaces could change the minds of people who’d otherwise turn up their noses at weed, they’re also making the experience better for longtime consumers.
Marianna Torres, 34, an aesthetician who lives in Huntington Beach, Calif., said that she first came across the Wyllow dispensary on TikTok. “It’s definitely not the typical warehouse-looking store. I thought, ‘Oh, this is aesthetic. Let me go check this out,” she said. “It almost didn’t feel like I was in a store, more like an experience or a museum.”
For Bill Rutsey, 75, who has been using cannabis since his late teens, going into a Superette store was “a stimulating, visible experience, as opposed to the staid, boring feel of a dispensary behind a counter.”
Mr. Rutsey, who is now retired and lives in Toronto, added, “it’s kind of like the difference between the feelings you get going into Supreme versus J.C. Penney.”
