Hermès Conjures a Green Oasis Atop Its New Manhattan Flagship
It’s a crisp day in Manhattan and Miranda Brooks is talking plants. “Euthamia, or goldenrod, is from Long Island,” notes the AD100 landscape designer. “This is a Rhus, which turns a lovely reddish color in the autumn. The Clematis paniculata will have tiny little white flowers in the late summer.”
These mostly native species have found a happy home on the rooftop of the new Hermès flagship at 706 Madison Avenue. Accessible to all shoppers, the garden is a calm reprieve from the streets below—and particularly on the occasion of our tour, as sidewalks were being painted, stages installed, and food trucks lined up to fete the store’s opening. Later that night, an Hermès musical would unfold inside the boutique and around the block.
“This wasn’t going to be just some roof,” Brooks says with a laugh. “This is Hermès. They were making a whole world.” The 20,250-square-foot boutique (just a block north from the brand’s former location) combines a 1920s Federal-style bank and two adjoining town houses into one L-shaped plan. “Our wish was to explore what Art Deco could be today,” explains architect Denis Montel of the Paris-based firm RDAI, who used the edifices as a conceptual springboard for the design. “The buildings and their histories communicate with each other.” No detail was unconsidered, from sumptuous walls clad in straw marquetry, crackled lacquer, or recycled leather to floors painted in marble trompe l’oeil. Even the clock—a nonfunctional relic from the bank building—was cleverly set to 7:06 in honor of its address.
“Hermès is like a tree,” muses Pierre-Alexis Dumas, the brand’s artistic director, of its creative spirit. On the double-height top floor, true to form, fiberglass bas-relief by the French artist François Houtin depicts an imaginary forest, whose fantastical greenery seems to unfold in Brooks’s landscape just outside. Inspired by an oval dressage course, in a nod to Hermès’s equestrian roots, the traditional garden looks as if it’s been left to grow wild. “We’ll see what takes,” she notes, alluding to the few inches of soil. “It’s going to be survival of the fittest.”
At 706 Madison Avenue; hermes.com
