Barneys New York
Ginza, Tokyo, Japan
Jeffrey Hutchison & Associates

Jeffrey Hutchison interprets a high-end retailer’s philosophy of luxury, taste, and humor for Japan’s glitzy Ginza District

© TUCS Photography

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Manhattan architect Jeffrey Hutchison has a long history of working with Barneys New York, the high-end purveyor of luxury goods. Hutchison worked on the Barneys flagship store on Madison Avenue in Manhattan and an outpost in Beverly Hills while in the office of architect Peter Marino. In 1999, he founded his own firm, Jeffrey Hutchison & Associates, which redesigned the Co-Op department and did a major overhaul of the cosmetics area in the New York flagship. Barneys’ executives called on Hutchison to design a new three-story branch in Tokyo, the third in Japan.

The Tokyo location, which opened in October, involved the interior fit-out of a new developer-built tower in neon-filled Ginza. Barneys would occupy the basement, ground floor, and second floor of the 10-story building. The store’s 10,000-square-foot floor plates—a rarity in space-starved Tokyo—were a double liability. Hutchison didn’t want to chop up the uninterrupted floors, but he had to accommodate the Japanese desire to keep men’s and women’s departments separate. And Barneys’ philosophy of store design embraces natural light—counter to the old-fashioned department-store model of dark, internalized realms where shoppers tune out the outside world to focus on buying. But the developer’s design didn’t allow for windows. Even if it had, the deep floor plates made it hard to get light into the center of the space.

Hutchison determined that the best way to resolve the issue of spatial divisions within the large floor plates was through what he calls “screen walls.” Working with artist John-Paul Philippe, who has created three-dimensional installations for other Barneys locations, Hutchison developed a series of hanging dividers with enough visual and material heft to give them an architectonic quality. The most important divider is the one surrounding the staircase that links the store’s three levels. Hutchison and Philippe developed a series of bold sculptural elements in blackened steel that surround the staircase with free-form organic cutouts.

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Formal name of Project:
Barneys New York

Location:
Ginza, Tokyo, Japan

Gross square footage:
36,000 sq. ft.

Owner:
Barneys New York
Barneys Japan Co. LTD

Architect:
Jeffrey Hutchison & Associates, LLC
435 Hudson Street 8th Floor
New York NY 10014
T:212-366-1611
F:212-645-9090