Louis Vuitton’s luxury pit stop houses store, library and chocolate bar in New York City
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The fifth floor of Louis Vuitton's new temporary store is reserved for private clients.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
NEW YORK – Being temporary in the world of luxury is still quite nice.
A new store by Louis Vuitton is opening near a stretch of Manhattan known as Billionaires’ Row. It is built to last for only a couple of years while the company renovates its flagship across the street.
Customers are greeted with a towering installation in the store’s atrium, designed by Shohei Shigematsu, an architect at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture firm.
Four sculptural pillars of stacked LV trunks climb towards the roughly 15m ceiling, reminiscent of a game of Tetris.
“Stepping into a Louis Vuitton store is about embarking on a journey,” LV chief executive Pietro Beccari said in an e-mail.
During his tenure, LV has aggressively continued to position itself as a cultural brand.
Mr Beccari featured tennis legends Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal hiking in Italy’s Dolomites for an advertising campaign in 2024. In 2023, he appointed producer Pharrell Williams as LV’s men’s creative director.
The house has also expanded into the world of dining and hospitality. It brought on board acclaimed French chefs Arnaud Donckele and Maxime Frederic to oversee various culinary ventures globally, including Le Cafe, a concept restaurant designed around what the house calls “luxury snacking”.
Louis Vuitton bags hanging on hand-shaped hooks at the new temporary store in Manhattan’s East 57th Street.
For the New York City store, Le Cafe will include a bar and library space, seat up to 70 people and offer dishes such as monogrammed savoury waffles with caviar (US$48 or S$64), a cheeseburger (US$32) and desserts like a Bartlett pear tart (US$22).
“It’s the type of food that perfectly fits with shopping,” chef Donckele said in an e-mail. “You can stop and eat for five minutes just as easily as you can spend two hours at a table.”
LV hired two chefs based in New York, the Michelin-starred Christophe Bellanca and Mary George of the restaurant Daniel. They began conceiving an American-specific menu a few months ago, while still working closely with chefs Donckele and Frederic.
It is a model of crafting region-specific dining experiences that the house has adopted with other LVMH restaurants around the world, including LV’s Le Cafe in Bangkok and Le Hall in Chengdu, China. Le Hall was awarded a Michelin star in September.
The library – curated by Mr Ian Luna, an editor and writer at the publishing house Rizzoli – features more than 650 books devoted to food, art, architecture, travel and other topics (curiously, literature appears to be absent from the exhaustive selection), alongside the label’s titles from its expanding publications department.
The same floor also has America’s first LV chocolate bar. Made by chef Frederic, the space features an assortment of sweets – all from Paris – that include chocolate bars with the house’s famous checkerboard Damier print (starting at US$32) and the brand’s mascot, Vivienne Doudou, standing on an LV trunk (US$375).
“The parallel between leather and craftsmanship in chocolate making is incredible,” chef Frederic said in an e-mail. “Chocolate is like leather. The gestures are the same, with equal precision.”
The chocolate bar at Louis Vuitton’s temporary store.
The store’s first, second and third floors are still dedicated to good old-fashioned shopping for jewellery, accessories, menswear and womenswear. The fifth floor is reserved for private clients of the house and available only by appointment.
LV also designed an exclusive capsule collection for the store’s opening – featuring New York City colours such as taxicab yellow and imagery like skyscrapers and New York City licence plates. Hot stamp machines and artisans are available near the luggage and handbag sections, should customers wish to customise their items upon purchase.
The location at 6 East 57th Street was home to a Niketown, and its exposed brick walls and collegiate-looking seals on the wall are a reminder of the space’s former inhabitants.
More recently, the location was used as a temporary Tiffany’s store while the neighbouring flagship underwent a massive renovation. In 2021, LVMH acquired Tiffany’s.
Trunks stacked several storeys high at Louis Vuitton’s new temporary store.
The brand did not say whether the contents of the temporary store are an indicator of what is coming for its flagship – whenever it reopens.
LV was one of the first fashion houses to conceive of artist-driven collaborations. Displays near each floor’s lifts highlight the partnerships with Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami, Supreme, Yayoi Kusama and Richard Prince.
“Bringing culture into our spaces isn’t something new to Louis Vuitton,” Mr Beccari said. “It’s an essential part of our heritage.” NYTIMES
