A Look Inside Louis Vuitton’s Newest—and Biggest—Store in Italy
The timing spoke volumes when French heritage brand Louis Vuitton reopened its Milan flagship earlier this spring during the city’s annual design week. The four-level store, entirely reimagined by Elle Decor A-List architect Peter Marino, was instantly packed with shoppers, curious design devotees and fashion fans. Designed around a typically Milanese courtyard, the flagship has a staircase inspired by the city’s famed Villa Necchi, departments for everything from fashion and high jewelry to furniture and tableware, and a pair of restaurants serving up pasta and tiramisu decorated with LV monograms.
Marino spent three years on the ambitious overhaul of the 1835 Palazzo Taverna, the building on Via Montenapoleone, one of Milan’s chicest shopping streets, that has been home to the Vuitton flagship since 2011. He kept the neoclassical Ionic columns and tympani that were part of the design of the original architect, Ferdinando Albertolli, a renowned design professor at the Brera Academy. But Marino doubled the palazzo’s footprint and put his own stamp on almost everything else. He was inspired by a classic Milanese arrangement: a casa di ringhiera, a building in which apartments overlook a central open core. Meanwhile, the palazzo’s former entry was glassed in with a modern skylight and transformed into a courtyard café.
The opening was timed to the launch of the Louis Vuitton Home Collections, which expands on the brand’s existing Objets Nomades line and now includes a new collection of furniture and lighting along with decorative objects and textiles, tableware, and games. There’s striking new seating by Argentine designer Cristian Mohaded, a whimsical Studio Campana foosball table and textiles based on patterns by French icon Charlotte Perriand.
The house’s monogrammed trunks have been reimagined for almost every imaginable purpose—as a flower vase, a china cabinet, or even a roulette table. “What would a Louis Vuitton home look like?” asks Patrick Jouin, a French designer who was tasked to answer that question. He came up with pieces that are elegant but joyful—from a curvy sectional that can seat a dozen to a leather armchair fastened trunk-style with a golden padlock.
Milanese landscape designer Marco Bay, who had worked with Marino on the Cipriani hotel in Venice, was tapped to fill the space with greenery. His custom zinc planters, overflowing with asparagus plants and ferns, spill over the courtyard’s railings.
One room on the fourth-level home floor isn’t Italian in inspiration at all: the Art Nouveau-style space, with pistachio walls and plasterwork vines, is based on the Vuitton family’s historic home in Asnières-sur-Seine, France. Marino also incorporated contemporary art throughout the store by Carla Accordi, Farhad Moshiri, Peter Halley, and others. On the lower level, an oversize painting of the Pink Panther by American artist Katherine Bernhardt presides over the formal restaurant, the DaV by Da Vittorio Louis Vuitton. “Vuitton products are fun, fashionable, and quite fabulous,” Marino says. “I’m hoping all visitors to the store will feel that way, too.”
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