Robert Dallet plates are a highlight at Hermès flagship
Last week’s big reveal of the swanky new Hermès flagship was a smash. Le ToutToronto turned up in glittering droves for the champagne-drenched opening night. They were greeted by skating forest creatures and serenaded by Drake at the wonderfully whimsical after-party.
With the new store, the venerable and still family-owned French fashion house more than doubled the floor space of its earlier Mink Mile HQ in a 5,800-squarefoot showstopper of a store that’s perhaps more impressive from a design and architecture standpoint than any of this country’s art museums.
Designed by Paris’ RDAI architects as a sort of fortress to the brand (which I must admit having always had a soft spot for, given its design heritage, relative integrity and restrained, yet offbeat sensibility), the new flagship’s makeover of the former Williams-Sonoma begins with a Roman brickwork façade of rosy beige Danish bricks modernized by large recessed and bevelled windows onto Bloor St. The haute finishes of the interior — with its basket-weave-like Faubourg mosaic floors and central nautilus of a stair with a curving leather handrail — simply leave every other high-end retailer on the strip in the dust.
The signature scarves, bags and perfumes now boast their own dedicated areas. But best of all, there’s room in this new Toronto Hermès for them to fully display — and for us to revel in — one of the brand’s less well-known treasures: its home collection.
Indeed, for the first time since Hermès opened its doors here back in 1976, we now can drool over the venerable design house’s admittedly pricey yet highly covetable collection of wallpapers, textiles, home accessories and fine objects.
This plate, for instance, is part of a magnificent collection of tableware called Carnets d’Equateur that represents the life’s work of the late French artist and naturalist Robert Dallet, whose wonderfully animated sketches and paintings of flora and fauna have been reproduced faithfully on porcelain by the folks at Hermès.
The full collection, which includes some 80 different, yet co-ordinating designs of Dallet’s on plates, bowls, tea and coffee sets and serving pieces, can be fully enjoyed as a sort of evocative visual journey — particularly in the way it is displayed atop a dining table on the second floor, with charmingly mismatched plates of various shapes and sizes featuring different Dallet drawings layered atop one another like pages from the artists’ own folio of sketches from an exploratory jungle expedition.
I love the combination of the loosely rendered blue-on-white sketches of equatorial flora, with the visual surprise of a lifelike jungle cat making an appearance — sometimes, as with our jaguar, here, from a corner — as if the actual cat had just leapt onto a plate.
As with the new store, the sheer whimsy of it — alongside its appeal as an object of beauty — is what makes it so very Hermès. And what, in the end, is more rare and precious in this all too predictable world than that? Karen von Hahn is a Toronto-based writer, trend observer and style commentator. Her new book, What Remains: Object Lessons in Love and Loss, is published by the House of Anansi Press. Contact her at kvh@karenvonhahn.com.