Orange Boxes on Berry Street, Hermès Settles Into Williamsburg
After three years in a temporary shop, the Paris house opens a permanent Brooklyn store built around a courtyard and a sweetgum tree
Hermès now has a permanent address in Brooklyn. The store at 130 Berry Street, on the corner of North 6th Street in Williamsburg, opened its doors on September 17. Cultured counts it as the house's 44th store in the United States.
For three years the brand has been feeling out the neighborhood from a temporary shop down the block at 91 North 6th Street. That pop up opened in 2023 and has now closed. Its replacement is not a pop up in any sense. It is a two floor building designed from the facade inward to look like it has always been here.
A Block That Isn't Quite Old
Walk up Berry and the building reads at first like a row of neighbors. It is actually one structure dressed as several. Galerie reports that the exterior is made of five distinct brick facades that take their cue from the blocks around it. Brownstoner, checking in on the site in August, saw a new building made up to pass for a group of 19th century brick structures. Old looking windows are filled in with brick, and large modern panes break through the walls at odd spots. At the rear, the cladding switches to bronze brick, with columns finished to match. Brownstoner suggested some might read it as a trompe l'oeil tribute to Williamsburg, and the joke seems to be on purpose.
Before Hermès, this corner held a Marine Layer, a Gant and The Future Perfect, the home design shop that has since moved to Manhattan. That list alone traces the arc of North Brooklyn retail. First the independents. Then the lifestyle labels. Now one of the most storied houses in fashion has put down roots on the same corner.
It is actually one structure dressed as several.
The brick walls wrap around a courtyard shaded by an American sweetgum tree. In a neighborhood where most storefronts open straight onto the sidewalk, a courtyard with a tree is an unusual gesture.
Inside the House
The design is by the Paris architecture firm RDAI, and the palette leans on the neighborhood. According to Cultured, the rooms are finished in raw brick, gray terrazzo and metalwork. Mosaic flooring and the Hermès crest are the first things visitors meet. The staircase is the showpiece. It was designed to recall the fire escapes that zigzag down the fronts of city buildings, and its handrails are wrapped in leather. A double height brick mural rises beside it.
The ground floor is where most people will linger. It holds silk, fashion jewelry, fragrance and beauty, and women's and men's shoes. The home collection is staged as a living room, with walls finished in woven leather straps, baby blue shoelaces and cotton fibers.
Upstairs the mood gets quieter. Jewelry and watches have their own salon. Ready to wear for women and men sits on oak floors. There is space for the equestrian collection and for leather goods, set on patterned rugs and lit by natural light. Galerie notes the building has room for all 16 of the house's métiers, its word for the separate crafts it works in.
Art on the Walls, Brooklyn in the Windows
Hermès treats this store partly as a gallery. The walls carry works from the Émile Hermès Collection and the Hermès Collection of Photographs. Among them are photographs by Bill Jacobson and Janet Delaney, and architectural studies from Philippe Weisbecker's Structures series, which looks closely at early 20th century industrial buildings. That last choice fits the address. Williamsburg grew up as a district of warehouses and factories, and the store's own brick costume borrows from exactly that vocabulary.
The windows went local. They feature figurines by the designer Antoine Platteau, made in collaboration with the Brooklyn artist Christina Zimpel.
Galerie calls Hermès the first couture caliber brand to set up a deliberately long term home in North Brooklyn, noting that Gucci and Bottega Veneta only ran pop ups there. It is a big claim, and on this corner it is hard to argue with. Hermès tested the water with a temporary lease, then stayed. The long pop up on North 6th Street was, in hindsight, a three year fitting.
It is worth putting next to the other luxury openings of the season. In SoHo, Victoria Beckham opened her first permanent New York store on Mercer Street in early September. Hermès went the other way, across the river, to a neighborhood whose bars and restaurants keep it busy well into the night.
Stores close. Neighborhoods don't. After the shop locks up for the night, the building stays on the block as a piece of street scenery. A bronze clad back wall, five brick faces pretending to be old, and a tree in a courtyard.
For the people who live here, the question is less about the handbags than about what the building says. Williamsburg has been a factory district, an artists' neighborhood, a nightlife capital and a condo boom. With an Hermès on Berry Street, it is now also a luxury address in the most literal sense. The giant images of orange boxes that filled the windows before the opening were a kind of promise. Now the doors are open, and the promise is kept.
