Let’s talk about luxury! The new townhouse of Louis Vuitton at Selfridges.
Five years in the making, Louis Vuitton’s latest “retail playground” — a 10,000-square-foot, three-story shop-in-shop known as the Townhouse that features a revolving glass elevator inside a double helix, and an interactive “digital atelier” — has opened at Selfridges.
For the first time at Selfridges, Louis Vuitton has united all of its collections under one roof, including the collections by men’s style director Kim Jones, which had not been carried at the London department store until now. The new Vuitton store has its own entrance, next door to the main Selfridges one on Oxford Street.
What a roof it is: Created by the French-born, Japan-based architect Gwenaël Nicolas, the hero feature is a glass elevator that revolves like a corkscrew inside a double-helix-shaped structure with a stream of floating handbags inside it. The starting point for his brief was to connect the three floors and rather than simply install a nice new lift, he decided to give it a bit of a twist.
In the words of Alannah Weston, creative director, Selfridges, “we worked so long with Louis Vuitton, and what we wanted for this space was incredible architecture, innovative technology and art. And I loved the notion of travel, the sense of a journey.” The voyage, a recurring theme in the Vuitton collections are seen in a space for the first time with such prominence. She also adds, “I wanted this store to be a one-off, something that people would travel to see” of the place that features different qualities of light on the three different floors in order to incorporate travelers’ changing perceptions, as the quality of light changes upon moving from one country to the next.
I’m pretty sure that will be a success! Aren’t you exciting to visit this store?
It’s a good place to buy the perfect present, don’t you think ?
