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New Look for the Iron Palace

Mexico’s luxury department store creates an organic floor plan for wandering and exploring

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El Palacio de Hierro (Mexico City), the Mexican department store chain, is approaching its 125th anniversary. In that time, it has opened exactly 12 stores. But anyone who thinks that suggests a cautious approach to retail experimentation hasn’t seen its newest flagship store in the booming city of Villahermosa, down in the scorpion’s tail that is southern-most Mexico.

The oil and gas-rich city has earned the luxury retailer’s newest concept. And when architect Alec Zaballero, design principal at New York’s TPG Architecture, refers to it as “a box full of amoebas,” he’s being entirely descriptive.

The mall anchor store has forsaken the traditional department store racetrack footpath for what is essentially no footpath at all. Instead, the many individual merchandise departments are all in their own hard-walled rooms. And the “rooms” are not the rectangular boxes that normally define the word.

“There’s not a straight line in the entire store,” Zaballero says. Instead, El Palacio de Hierro’s store planners and designers created a concept in which each room is organically shaped – ovals, ellipses, circles and free forms – touching the adjoining room via a single connecting doorway.

“What drives traffic is not a defined aisle pattern that tells shoppers where to go,” Zaballero says. “It’s a whole series of visual cues that leads shoppers on a journey of discovery.”

And that required a lot of design work because there are 32 separate departments.

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“This is an old-fashioned department store, the kind that has essentially disappeared from the U.S. marketplace,” says Zaballero. Not only apparel but also furniture, home appliances, consumer electronics and sporting goods fill the two-level, 215,000-square-foot space.

“There’s even an optical shop, an insurance office and a travel agency,” says the architect.

The design inspiration pulling all this together was the Paris boulevard layout, the 1860s vision of plazas and landmarks created by civic planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who transformed a medieval city into a modern European capital. For retail inspiration, designers turned to the series of merchandise “halls” in London’s Harrods.

As in Harrods, each department is treated as an independent retail store with its own individuality, highlighted by a central design feature. In the beachwear department, for example, a suspended treatment of art glass shards over an under-lit floor creates a shell pattern around mannequins in bikinis. One dress department has a tall, black-laquered platform backdropping an 11-foot screen made of antique bronze panels.

The women’s casual department, says Zaballero, is inspired by an idealized mid-Atlantic/Outer Banks beach house; the contemporary department is more urban and edgy, with concrete, polished steel and neon fixtures.

On the main floor, the highlight of the store is a mini-luxury mall of hard brand shops by the likes of Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Ferragamo and Carolina Herrera. These brands have become very desirable to Mexican consumers, who have had to travel to Miami or Dallas to shop for them.

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“This is a key part of the strategy,” says Zaballero. “It’s how luxury brands are entering the Mexican market.” High-end street-front stores in most Mexican cities require private armed security guards, but in-store shops within a mall provide a secure, controlled environment for preferred clientele.

And there seems to be plenty of that clientele. An emerging market, Mexico has – along with Brazil – one of Latin America’s most thriving economies. And as the steward to the wealthy, El Palacio de Hierro is considering an aggressive expansion program – presumably more than 12 stores in the next 125 years.

But Zaballero says the design direction has been set in Villahermosa and each store going forward will be different. “These are regional flagships aimed at the local market,” he says, and Mexico has a variety of distinct markets: urban, rural, industrial, northern, southern, historic, new, temperate, tropical. Even the type of wealth varies from market to market – oil and gas in Villahermosa, but elsewhere it’s financial or agricultural or industrial or ranching.

How many different ways can Palacio de Hierro reinvent itself? “We’ll see!” says Zaballero. “The ride should be fun.”

Project Suppliers

Retailer & Design
El Palacio De Hierro, Mexico City: Jose Luis del Hoyo, chief real estate officer; Carlos Salcido, marketing director; Francisco de Leon, construction director; Azul Gomez, project manager; Maria del Carmen Gomez, project manager; Mauricio Camacho, project manager; Gerardo Percastegui, project manager

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Design & Architecture
TPG Architecture, New York: James Phillips, principal in charge; Alec Zaballero, design principal; Diana Revkin, account manager; Vlad Zadneprianski, project manager; Aya Matsumoto, senior designer; Niki Varadi, senior designer; Sangmin Park, senior designer, Nilushka Reiff, designer; Dustin Dis, designer; Leah Lefkowitz, designer; Eric Bourassa, project architect; Michael Limaco, project architect

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T.Kondos Associates, New York
Ideas en Luz, Tlalnepantla, Mexico

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Fabulux, Inc., New York
Restoration Hardware, Corte Madera, Calif.

Foscarini, Marcon, Italy
3Form, Salt Lake City

Exterior Architect
Grupo Sordo Madaleno, Mexico City

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