MAKING A SILK PURSE OUT OF SOW'S EAR
There's no more Restoration Hardware on lower Fifth Avenue. I was distraught until I realized they didn't give up on New York, they just moved. The newest venture for RH is in the Meat Packing District on the far West Side down around West Fourteenth Street. In a former time, before the AIDS epidemic had hit and decimated New York's gay community, the Meat Packing District was a warren of cobblestone streets streaked with rivulets of blood from the slaughtered carcasses hung from meat hooks on the awning covered sidewalks. It teamed with hulky butchers in death stained white coats during the day and rough looking men in skintight leather pants and vests hanging around seamy doorways and cruising for another trick.
Slowly the meat packers moved out as urban pioneers started taking over the incredible industrial architectural gems that began to make the area so desirable. Then once the Highline turned an old abandoned elevated railroad track into a park running through the heart of the area the blood on the streets dried up and the architecture took on a new life.
Restoration Hardware's newest addition to the area has taken another of the district's brick giants
and crowned it with an additional two stories and a rooftop in RH's signature black and glass.
The once sleazy Ninth Avenue is now a posh artery pumping green dollars instead of rivers of bovine blood.
The minute you walk through the glass doors on Ninth Avenue you know you've entered the newest trend in retail design. Evocative of the department stores of the turn of the twentieth century
you are placed in an enormous galleria ringed on every upper level by a series of balconies all the way to the glass ceiling.
At the visual end of the entry is a concierge desk stationed in front of an elegant glass elevator creating the illusion that you might have entered a new Ian Schrager hotel rather than a furniture store.
Elegance seeps from every alcove as you peer to your left and right into the rooms that set the tone for the rest of the magic.
Gargantuan garden statuary that I presumed to be reproductions line the galleria acting as sentries.
Behind each statue is a reflective mirror giving the impression of having entered a modern day Versailles. Without clearly visible price tags you're not sure if you've been invited here to live out a fantasy in a manor house of your dreams.
This is the trend I've long thought was on its way to the brick and mortar aspect of retail sales. If brick and mortars were going to survive in an age of technology and online sales they were going to have to find a way beyond just selling product to draw customers in; shopping needed to become an experience.
Restoration Hardware has made that happen in spades.
First it's sheer drama. You're taken on a magic carpet ride through destinations you didn't even know existed.
Each staircase is a modern day recreation of the most opulent grand staircases of the famous opera houses around the world.
Descending one is equivalent to transforming you into Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio entering the ballroom of the Titanic.
Every room is a movie set where you can find someone lounging imagining themselves as the stars of their own art directed feature courtesy of Restoration Hardware.
It didn't matter that the scale of many of the vignettes were castle worthy having no possibility of ever fitting into a normal New York apartment.
It didn't matter that an entire floor was given over to children's lifestyles attainable solely for kids with royal pedigrees.
What did matter was that for the time you spent in Restoration Hardware's palace you were to be its lord and lady.
You were invited to sit in the living rooms,
lounge on the beds
and soak up the quintessential branding that is Restoration Hardware.
It's an easy suit to slip into. The fit is perfect. It feels custom made. It's stylish and oh so comfortable. It's definitely hard to resist.
To keep you there even longer there's a bar on the third floor, part of the newly added top floors to the original building, with a lounge where you can sit and bask in the light pouring through the floor to ceiling windows.
You're not required to sit. There's no waiter hovering around. Instead your encouraged to wonder wine in hand through the maze of rooms
as you fantasize about how their furniture and accessories would fit into your dream home.
The wine and cappuccinos only helping to weaken your resolve not to be sucked into purchasing a twelve-foot credenza you don't need or wouldn't fit into your man cave anyway.
The very top of the new Restoration Hardware in the Meat Packing District is a glass-topped restaurant dripping with crystal chandeliers,
an outdoor deck bubbling with fountains,
a view of lower Manhattan up to Mid-town and waiters at your beck and call.
The hope is you'll fall in love with the idea of an RH home. You can enter the world of RH, plop yourself down in its comfort, get the feel for its luxury, entertain the idea of it being your very own castle as you sip a merlot from an over-stuffed sofa your feet propped up on a tufted ottoman and eventually find you can't live without a piece of what they are offering.
THE GALLERY
The Queen at Buckingham Palace, 2007
Annie Leibovitz, photographer
Represented by Weinstein Hammons Gallery, Minneapolis
