On Being Appropriate: RH Arrives in Paris

Courtesy of RH

DURING THE LAST COUPLE of years, a number of RH (a.k.a., Restoration Hardware) “Galleries” (RH speak meaning “store”) have opened in locations across North America, from Newport Beach and Palo Alto, Calif., to Oklahoma City. With the possible exception of Linden House, the branch on the northern fringes of Indianapolis, which does look different, they have a certain neo-colonial similarity, and it would be easy to spot an RH store in a retail line-up on this basis.

Not so across The Pond, RH has just welcomed shoppers into its Champs Élysées store in what has to be one of Paris’ highest profile locations. The store, in fact, takes over a building that until the beginning of 2021 played host to an old-style Abercrombie & Fitch flagship where good-looking “models” (perish the thought that they should have been sales associates) wandered around an interior wearing not very much in a setting where loud music was one of the hallmarks.

Courtesy of RH

A&F has changed pretty radically and successfully since then, and in Paris, the new RH Gallery bears very little resemblance to the previous occupant’s store environment. With a verdant approach leading to an imposing entrance, the interior has a lot of Parisian Belle Époque about it, with a central void criss-crossed by escalators offering panoramic vistas across the whole. Up on the roof, diners can take in views towards the Eiffel Tower, and the sense is both that this feels perfectly at home in the City of Light and that it has perhaps been there for very much longer than just a few weeks.

A store, then, that has been designed externally and internally with the fact that it is at one end of what is probably the most iconic (in the true sense of the word) thoroughfares in the French capital. In terms of being appropriate to a location, RH knows what it is doing as it continues to forge European inroads.

Photography: Courtesy of RH