New York City
Heatherwick Studio

Thomas Heatherwick’s fluid design gets shoppers to flow inside and upstream at New York City’s La Maison Unique LongChamp

	Click here for slide show. Photo © Nic Lehoux
	Thomas Heatherwick, Director
	Click here for the people & products

Zippers are both functional and sexy, holding things together while offering the promise of revealing what’s hidden inside. At La Maison Unique Longchamp, a three-story retail facility in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood, the London designer Thomas Heatherwick applies zipper principles to architectural space, teasing shoppers to come inside and see what’s upstairs.

A flagship store for Longchamp, a French leather-goods company, the project resides in what Heatherwick describes as a “runty shoe box of a building” that posed all sorts of problems for creating a successful retail operation. The plain-Jane structure offered Longchamp ground-floor space that was not only limited to 1,500 square feet, but also squeezed awkwardly between a clothing store, in the prime corner spot, and a chocolate shop. But upstairs, Longchamp could spread out with a 4,500-square-foot second floor, and a newly added third floor with a 1,700-square-foot showroom plus a wraparound terrace for entertaining wholesale buyers. The challenge for Heatherwick was to grab attention with only a small streetfront presence and then entice people to schlep up a flight of stairs to the main retail space.

Trained at the Royal College of Art, Heatherwick runs a 38- person studio that designs everything from sculpture, such as Sitooterie II, in Essex, England, to the Rolling Bridge, in London. In 2004, Longchamp debuted a handbag designed by Heatherwick featuring a zipper that snakes up and around the outside. When unzipped, it reveals a satiny fabric layer inside and nearly doubles the bag’s volume. Instead of a clasp at the top, hidden magnets close the bag.

The designer employed similar strategies at Longchamp’s La Maison Unique, using undulating ribbons of rubber-coated steel to create a stair that seems to unfold as it rises, and orchestrating a procession from a tight, ground-floor lobby to the expansive second-floor retail. And as with the handbag, he found an inventive use for magnets—this time to secure light fixtures and shelves anywhere along the metal ribbons. Heatherwick calls the stair a “landscape,” a topographical feature inserted within a 46-by-27-foot atrium, cut from the corner of the building. The atrium rises 60 feet to a sloped skylight and required 55 tons of steel. Daylight from the top of the vertical space helps draw people upstairs, he says, noting, “Like insects, people are attracted to light.” When he envisioned the stairscape, he thought of “a hillside with goats climbing up winding paths.”

Want the full story? Read the entire article in our September 2006 issue.
Subscribe to Architectural Record in print, or get Architectural Record digitally

Read more about the people and products behind this project.