Club Monaco

Club Monaco

Rigos Mills

From the Interior Architect: 

This now iconic store on lower Fifth Ave in NYC was the global launch of Club Manaco's new store design.  

The design of the store took over a year of planning and coordination and eight months to build.  We started by gutting the entire 18,000 square foot space down to the studes, reconfiguring the floorplan, and moving the staircase.  In the process we found hidden staircases (which oddly went to nowhere), and original mouldings which were restored and recreated. 

The overall inspiration for the store was the grand department stores of Europe and the bulding itself, which, as we peeled back the decades of plaster and stone, began to tell us a story.  

Inside the store, we decided to change up the retail mux by adding a bookshop (the iconic strand
), a florist, a coffee shop for the neighborhood, a large shoe area, and a dedicated men's floor to help tell the entire story of what the men's division, led by Aaron Levine, had evolved into.  

The details of the stores are too many to mention - a custom wallpaper of falling gold leaves from the fromental was designed for the women's shoe area, large delicate steel tables were sourced in Australia, vintage cases were found and refinished in East London, the men's fireplace was found in Les Puces in Paris, the (very heavy) bronze chandelier in the women's fitting room area was made in Los Angeles by Jean De Merry.  

We also too the overall experiece into account - we designed the boxes for the florist to allow people to take away small boquets for dinner parties, soundtracks were made for each floor as well as different scents piped into each area making it unique.  

The store changed the retail game on lower fifth ave and helped set the tone and the stage for the global retail expansion which took place in the proceeding years across Europe and Asia.