Hermès has opened a new London flagship at 166 New Bond Street, one of the largest stores in its global network and now the biggest in Europe. The maison spans nearly 22,000 square feet across six interconnected Georgian townhouses, arranged into 55 rooms, two roof terraces, a café, and the spiral staircase that survives from the building’s years as Asprey, whose interior Norman Foster’s studio redesigned in the early 2000s. Foster + Partners returned for this project too, raising the limestone and glass staircase by two floors and connecting it to both wings of the building beneath a new steel and glass roof.
Hermès bought the freehold in 2009 for a reported £73 million, among the highest sums paid for a New Bond Street building at the time, so the opening caps a 17-year project and a six-year refurbishment overseen by artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas. Dumas has described the work as an effort to understand and revive the building rather than erase it: early-19th-century mosaic floors uncovered during renovation were restored rather than concealed, and the brand drew on references including Sir John Soane’s Museum to root the interiors in the address’s own history.
Colour does much of the organising work inside. Each of the maison’s product categories carries its own palette, drawn from British architecture and design: salmon and peach for womenswear, marine blue for menswear, sunflower yellow for watches and jewellery, and shades of red for leather accessories. The fragrance and beauty room, facing Albemarle Street at the rear, is papered floor to ceiling in hand-painted florals by the London illustrator Katie Scott, with butterflies the size of birds and snails climbing the walls. Dumas has called colour “the invisible force that creates emotion,” and the scheme also serves a practical purpose, signposting sixteen métiers across a building that was, in its Asprey days, a warren of mismatched rooms and dead ends.
A new sculpture anchors the ground-floor atrium: an oversized toy horse on wheels by the British artist Jessica Wetherly, commissioned after Dumas showed her a small glass horse from his great-grandfather’s collection. The piece sits alongside roughly 500 further works spanning illustration, classic, and contemporary art, part of an approach Dumas has framed as wanting visitors to feel the space is “inhabited” rather than simply merchandised.
The store is arranged by métier and carries the full maison home collection alongside leather goods, silk, and ready-to-wear, with watches and jewellery now occupying an entire floor rather than the small corner they held at the previous address. The former shop at 155 New Bond Street, home to Hermès for fifty years, and the Selfridges concession have both closed, with client accounts moving across automatically. Florian Craen, the brand’s executive vice president of sales and distribution, has framed the timing as a long-term bet rather than a response to the moment: London, he has said, remains one of Hermès’s largest European markets regardless of short-term shifts in tax policy or who is shopping in a given year.
The opening arrives as much of the wider luxury sector works through a downturn, and as London contends with higher business taxes and the loss of duty-free shopping for overseas visitors. Read against that backdrop, Hermès’s newest maison looks less like a gamble than a statement of confidence in a single address — one the house has now owned, in one form or another, for longer than most of its competitors have occupied theirs. Visit Hermès here.
