Hermès Arrives on London’s New Bond Street With a Blaze of Color, and a Tribute to British Culture
The French luxury brand has opened its long-awaited flagship on New Bond Street, and it's filled with nods to British heritage, tradition and craft.
LONDON — It’s a moment London has been waiting for since 2009 and now it has finally arrived in a blaze of color, and with a celebration of British tradition, art and craft.
On Friday, Hermès will open its London flagship at 166 New Bond Street, former home of British jeweler Asprey, 17 years after buying the property and following a six-year refurbishment overseen by artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas and his team.
It is the sixth Hermès flagship worldwide, and the opening is a defiant act of optimism in a city plagued by financial challenges that include sky-high taxes on businesses, the repeal of duty-free shopping for foreign tourists and the flight of the rich following the election of a Labour government two years ago.
The store, which comprises six interconnected buildings, is brimming with British history.
The Hermès team dug deep into the 19th century in particular, drawing colors, textures and interiors inspiration from places including Sir John Soane’s museum, former home of the Neoclassical architect and obsessive collector, and from the space itself, which spans nearly 22,000 square feet and has 55 color-coded, art-filled rooms.
“We wanted to understand this place, to build around it and to revive what might have been forgotten,” said Dumas in an interview ahead of the opening. “In one of the corridors, you’ll see mosaic floors. While we were renovating the space, we discovered mosaics from the early 19th century. Instead of hiding them, we found someone who was able to do a full restoration.”
He said the six-year renovation restored “the spirit of the space. This is central London. It is full of history, and generations of people who lived and worked here. We must not forget that.”
He described the flagship, now one of the largest Hermès stores in the world, as an “homage to British culture. The reference for elegance, for craftsmanship in the equestrian tradition has always been British know-how and culture. We had British saddlers working in our workshops a century ago, and my grandfather always used to say Hermès was the most ‘British’ of the French brands.”
Dumas added that it was humbling for Hermès “to pay homage to a country and a city we admire so much,” and described the interiors as looking like “a French company trying to express what they love about British interior architecture and culture.”
The new store is expressing its love for London in other ways, too, with a limited-edition shopping bag that has a tweaked logo nodding to the brand’s new New Bond Street home; a silk scarf with a cartoonish drawing of the store’s facade and two punk rockers standing out front, and a chubby man-shaped fragrance bottle with black bowler hat that Hermès discovered in its archive.
Dumas said he wants visitors “to feel the space is alive, like when you walk into a garden and you feel the place has a spirit, and has been thought through. We wanted a space that was inhabited, active, one that creates a sense of warmth, and maybe makes you smile.”
The space has been completely transformed from the purple-and-white Asprey days, with Dumas and his team not only conjuring British style but also responding to the movement of the sun through the building, which has a large atrium and vast spiral staircase at the center.
That staircase was designed by Foster and Partners when the building was refurbished under Lawrence Stroll and Silas Chou’s ill-fated ownership of Asprey in the early 2000s.
Take Me Higher
As part of the latest refurbishment, which was subject to numerous restrictions due to the buildings’ historical importance, the brand called back Foster’s team to raise the curling limestone and glass staircase by two floors, and connect it to both sides of the building. Foster’s team also added a new steel and glass roof.
The Norman Foster staircase at the new flagship.
Jamie Stoker/WWD
Hermès has also given that central atrium space a more village-y vibe, hanging antique metal signs on the original brick walls facing the atrium, and arranging some of the rooms on the ground floor as if they were small shops.
Asprey when it was on the site was always a higgledy-piggledy warren of rooms and floors, since the building was actually a combination of several different ones. The new Hermès maintains that charm — on the upper floors, the rooms come in all different sizes — but has simplified the layout to eliminate dead ends, and allow visitors to circulate more easily.
Color Guide
Color plays a big role, drawing people through the store, and signposting Hermès’ 16 different product categories, or métiers, which range from sports and saddlery to womenswear, menswear, fragrance and home interiors.
Each métier has its own color scheme inspired by British history, architecture and interior design, including peach and salmon pink for the womenswear rooms, marine blue for menswear, sunflower yellow for watches and jewelry, and shades of rich red for the leather accessories collections.
The fragrance, beauty and fashion jewelry room, which faces Albemarle Street at the back, has Alice in Wonderland flair, with hand-painted floral wallpaper by the London-based illustrator Katie Scott. Colorful flowers tower over guests, butterflies are as big as birds and snails and bumblebees crawl and buzz along the walls.
The space is bright, and should lift spirits, especially in the dark days of the London winter. There are more flowers and plants — real ones, in pots — on the roof terrace, which overlooks New Bond Street.
The inside courtyard with antique signage on the walls.
Jamie Stoker/WWD
Dumas said that when the French think about British homes, “we think of colors. Maybe [rich color] is also an Anglo-Saxon, Northern European [tradition] where winters are gray and cold. This is our British home in the U.K., so we wanted to play with color.”
The rainbow of saturated colors serves another purpose. “It structured and organized the space. We wanted each métier to have its own colorway. Color is life, color is the invisible force that creates emotion,” said Dumas.
The art on the walls, and the shop floor, adds another colorful dimension to the space. It’s a mix of oil paintings, technical sketches, silk scarves framed or hung like tapestries, and works from the Hermès private collection.
Dumas also commissioned a young British artist, Jessica Wetherly, to create a work for the store. Dumas said Wetherly was inspired by a visit to his great-grandfather’s collection where she spotted a small glass toy horse.
She ended up making an oversized toy horse on wheels, which sits near the center of the ground floor atrium.
‘Have a Good Time’
“It gives you a sense of scale in this big space, and — also — you don’t expect to see something like that when you walk into a store,” said Dumas, who’s hoping that the horse will put a smile on people’s faces, and allow them “to put their worries to the side, just for a while. I don’t expect people to come here to buy, I expect people to come here, walk through the store and have a good time,” he said.
The toy horse sculpture by Jessica Wetherly.
Jamie Stoker/WWD
The flagship’s opening is a long-awaited moment for Hermès, which has a number of stores in London, the largest of which was nearby, at 155 New Bond Street in the former Time & Life building famous for its Henry Moore sculptures and friezes done in Portland stone.
In an interview, Florian Craen, executive vice president of sales and distribution at Hermès, said it was tough to say goodbye to those sculptures, and to the building that had been home to Hermès for 50 years. But it had to happen.
“Here, we’re able to offer an experience that we couldn’t before at our former New Bond Street address. There are private spaces, there’s more room for all of the product categories, and the men’s section is completely different from what it was before, as is the space for shoes,” he said.
Watches and jewelry, Craen added, have an entire floor compared with a tiny corner in the old store. “It’s about giving more space to our product categories, but also offering a much more comfortable space and more room for customers,” he said.
Asked about Hermès’ choice to open at such a challenging moment for London, and the U.K., Craen said the brand is taking the long view. London, he said, remains a significant market, and a major contributor to the brand’s overall European sales.
The accessories rooms are painted in a rainbow of rich reds.
Jamie Stoker/WWD
“For the past 20 years, at least, London been one of our biggest European markets. And London is not only about Londoners — the world shops in London, and the role of all of our stores is to cater to and look after residents, visitors and expats,” he said.
He added that Hermès also keeps world events in perspective as it pursues its long-term plans.
“Every day you have news that tends to shift people’s expectations and behavior. People exit the U.K. for tax reasons” and then they may come back a few years later, he said.
Always ‘London’
“This is the story of our world today. Ever since we stepped into London, and into this project in particular, we took the long view that London will remain ‘London.’ It will remain one of the top cities in the world, certainly in terms of retail, but also in terms of cultural influence, shopping experience, political influence, and artistic life. Very few cities can offer what you can get in London, whether you are here for two days, two weeks, or two months,” he added.
There is clearly no shaking Hermès’ retail vision.
The brand currently has 293 stores worldwide, including six flagships on major city streets such as New Bond. According to Craen, it has around 20 retail projects on the go every year. Earlier this year it opened a unit in Beijing, and plans to cut the ribbon on a new store in Geneva in November.
The womenswear rooms are done in a muted palette of salmon and peach.
Jamie Stoker/WWD
In the U.S. it has plans to open a second unit in Chicago, and also has Brooklyn, Manhasset, N.Y., and San Diego on the retail docket.
It is canny with its investments. In 2009, after having scoured the neighborhood for years, Hermès paid 73 million pounds, or $117 million, for the New Bond Street space, according to real estate sources. The brand never confirmed the figure.
Asprey had been doing business on New Bond Street since 1847, and had owned the building until 2005, when the brand fell on hard times. Asprey’s then-owner, A&G group, sold the store to the Irish property group Quinlan Private for an estimated 55 million pounds, or $105 million at the time. Quinlan later flipped it to Hermès when it ran into financial difficulty following the drastic dip in commercial property prices since 2007.
Asprey, which is owned by John Rigas’ Sciens Capital Management, has since moved to a new, and much smaller, site nearby at 36 Bruton Street, and continues to sell fine jewelry.
