Galeries Lafayette Opens Luxembourg Flagship in Norman Foster- Designed Building
Stacked six floors high with a total of 70,000 square feet of space, an elevator bank runs through the center of the store. The selling space is set up on unfinished wood parquet, with French touches like Drucker bistrot chairs and tables and patches of tiled floor, kept airy with low display furniture.
“It’ conceived as an urban, city center store, human-sized and with a premium to luxury positioning for a Luxembourg clientele,” said Philippe Pedone, director of international development for the department store chain. The executive has been visiting China frequently, scouting for new locations in cities like Guangzhou, Xiamen, Suzhou and Chongqing. The group has a large store in Beijing and a smaller unit, just over half the size, in Shanghai, operated in a 50-50 venture with I.T., adding the means to tap into local consumption that is being encouraged by the Chinese government, which has lowered duties on some products.
At the new Luxembourg store, a rooftop restaurant caps the offer — a destination in itself — with a garden and two stories providing panoramic views of the city, still under construction, and angled windows that jut out over the street. The Manko restaurant, with a Peruvian slant, will be operated by Gaston Acurio and the Moma Group; glass elevators will ferry patrons from the ground floor directly to the top.
The Foster facade mixes glass panels with elongated triangular glass shapes, some gold, some transparent.
The ground floor is stocked with cosmetics, with open shelves, while glass walls at the street level offer a full view of the shopping space to passersby.
For the fashion-hungry, the group teamed with a local multibrand store, Smets, for a space carrying labels like
Off White, and the store also carries the group’s “Edit” concept, with exclusive brands or products with names like Maison Labiche, Cuisse de Grenouille and Rains, in the women’s section and Adidas, Tommy Sport and Calvin Klein Performance on a men’s floor.
Two floors are dedicated to men’s wear — more formal or casual, carrying brands like De Fursac and Lacoste. Young executives in the city will be a key client base, executives predicted.
Nationalities are mixed in the city, with less than a third from Luxembourg while French and Portuguese make up nearly 20 and 10 percent, respectively, according to the city’s mayor, Lydie Polfer. She described her city as open and welcome to different cultures, which are considered an economic, cultural and social “added value.”
“Here we have something that is covetable — social peace — there’s never been strikes here, at least not in the past 20 years,” she added, in a slight poke at France. France is bracing for widespread transport strikes next week, which are expected to cause disruptions to schools and businesses, including retail.
Executives at Galeries Lafayette are growing accustomed to seeing their plans run up against unexpected challenges in the French capital.
The family-owned group revealed plans to set up a new flagship on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris five years ago, not knowing it would later become the scene of the violent yellow vest protests, which gripped the city late last year.
The store has underperformed expectations, even if it has been widely praised for its forward-looking style, crafted with the assistance of star architect Bjarke Ingels Group, better known for designing futuristic headquarters for Silicon Valley giants. Galeries Lafayette has embraced a fashion-forward approach for building relevance for the future and group executives consider it a success, in terms of image, even as they continue to tweak its format to adapt to shifting local preferences.
Earlier this month, reinforcing its hold on Paris, it opened a new mid-sized department store at the Beaugrenelle shopping center in the west of Paris.
In the coming months, the group will concentrate on extracting synergies from its recently acquired catalogue homeware and apparel business La Redoute, which it has expanded to new markets, with plans to open a site in Germany early next year.
Heading into the crucial holiday season, the group has seen a slight growth in business so far this year, executives estimated, cautioning that the weight of the end-of-year period will be a deciding factor for the annual performance.