Pharmacies used to be have it all. They used to be lined with floor to ceiling wooden cabinets, bulging with apothecary bottles and home-made remedies by the pharmacist’s wife. They had rose water for sale, bottled in crystal-cut jars, sitting alongside beautifully crafted containers of pills ointments and tinctures. But then, with the thirst for change during the latter part of the Twentieth century, things went downhill. Pharmacies really lost their cool. Oak fixtures and fittings were replaced with lino floors and strip lighting that forced brows to furrow. 

But something’s happening. There are stirrings on the pharmacy scene, and on a global scale. It appears they’re once again becoming the mecca of beauty cool. As New York pharmacist Stanley George said recently in T Magazine, ‘The whole feeling of a pharmacy is unhappiness. Prescriptions, insurance problems, being lost in aisles of product and not knowing what to pick. Fluorescent lighting. It’s not good.’ Damn right Stanley. And thank the Lord he’s changing the face of pharmacies as we know them with his new Lower East Side venture, named, fittingly, Stanley’s. An up-to-date experience incorporating everything from youth-boosting elixirs, hi-tech vitamins in snazzy packaging and a whole host of other ailments to sort hung-over Lower East Side hipsters right out. He’s also wised up to opening times, throwing the shop doors open early each morning to allow said hipsters to fuel up on supplements before they head off for brunch at Schiller’s. 

Stanley isn’t alone though. Oh no. There’s the newly opened Farmacia de los Austrias, in Madrid, which looks like quite the coolest place ever. It looks like a cross between a trend pop-up restaurant mixed with an edgy West London gallery space. Forget white metal shelves; here things are displayed on specially designed glass and metal structures, with cool filament light bulbs hanging overhead. It looks like the kind of space NASA might design in the year 2086. Or the Saatchi gallery. Not dissimilar is Pharmacy M across the way in Belgium. All squares and glass and elevations, it brings some a certain amount of edge to what is essentially a slightly soul-less town. From the outside, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a tequila bar. Or an art house cinema. Or the reincarnation of Damien Hirst’s Notting Hill situated Pharmacy restaurant. Either way, it’s not a bar or restaurant; it’s a very modern pharmacy.

Athens is also pushing things forward for the humble chemist with the tongue-in-cheek named Placebo Pharmacy. It’s circular shaped and full of all those architectural musts like wooden cladding and juxtaposing lines. Designed by famed Greek architect Konstantinos Labrinopoulos, he has used Braille writing on the exterior to both reference the pharmaceutical packets and also allow pockets of light in. Clever, no? Along with brushed aluminium counters and drawers with all the medicines inside. And bespoke display cabinets. And a split mezzanine and gigantic glass windows that flood the space with natural light. Very modern, very Grand Designs. 

All of which makes popping out for a box of Day-Quil an altogether more culturally uplifting experience. London next please.