English Leather

Asprey (London), the luxury goods company, will be tripling its retail space in New York's Trump Tower.

The store will expand to 27,000 square feet, moving horizontally into space on Fifth Avenue just north of the shop's current entrance near 56th Street (being vacated by Ferragamo) and vertically into vacant retail space on the second and third floors.

John Andrew, a director of construction management firm Gardiner & Theobald, says the store design — by British architect Sir Norman Foster — will include “a grand staircase” that will draw customers to the upper floors.

Asprey is the former Asprey & Garrard, a 220-year-old London company that was bought in 2000 by Sportswear Holding Ltd., which also own Tommy Hilfiger. In 2001, Garrard (jeweler to the British royal family since Queen Victoria) was split off to concentrate, it was said at the time, on developing more stylish products. Asprey said it would add clothing, shoes, accessories and housewares to its traditional lines of jewelry, silverware, leather goods, guns and books.

Not having a final design and not knowing what mix of clothing, shoes and hard goods will be stocked is complicating project planning, said Andrew, whose company has supervised store renovations for Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Burberry and Yves St. Laurent. “If you do a store for Gucci or Louis Vuitton, they know how many suits and shoes and so forth will be in there,” he told The New York Times. “Here, we are designing the space as the product line develops.”

The store will not be closed while the expansion proceeds. A timetable has been prepared to keep operating in part of the current space, while the alterations, which include a new facade on Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, are constructed.

A temporary store will be built as soon as the 2002 holiday shopping season is over, in the back of the current 9000-square-foot space, with an entrance from 56th Street or via a corridor leading from Fifth Avenue. “If we do come in from Fifth Avenue,” Andrew said, “it will be with highly finished walls. You have to maintain the image.”

The expanded store is scheduled to be ready for the year-end shopping season of 2003. The store will be shaped like an inverted pyramid, with the third-floor space the largest and tapering down to the small basement. The design will be patterned after the home store in London, which is also currently being refurbished.

When Asprey moved into the second level of the six-story Trump Tower atrium in 1983, it was its first location outside its New Bond Street London home. In 1985, it moved onto Fifth Avenue by buying out the lease of Loewe, a leather goods store then in the space.

The owners of Asprey and of Garrard — which include co-chairmen Silas Chou and Lawrence Stroll, and new 40 percent owner Edgar Bronfman Jr. (the Seagram's scion) — have said they plan to capitalize on both well-known brand names by establishing new stores around the world. They said they planned to open as many as 20 new Asprey and 10 new Garrard stores in the next few years.