Hermès’s Maisons in Asia: Ginza, Seoul and Shanghai
A glass-block lantern by Renzo Piano in Tokyo, a courtyard house beside Dosan Park in Seoul and a restored historic building in Shanghai: three ways Hermès builds its maisons.
Hermès calls its large stores maisons, and in Asia three of them show the range of the house’s thinking.
Ginza: the lantern
Maison Hermès in Ginza was designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop with Rena Dumas Architecture Intérieure, on a narrow plot on Harumi-dori. Its glass-block façade is about 13,000 blocks hung on steel arms.
Seoul: the courtyard
La Maison Hermès Dosan Park in Seoul was completed in 2006, designed by Rena Dumas with Denis Montel of RDAI and Nicolas Karmochkine, and built with Tetra Architects as executive architect. It stands next to Dosan Park on a site of 1,150 square metres, with 7,745 square metres of floor area and only 900 square metres of shop. The rest is a café (Madang), a museum (the Promenade Museum), exhibition space, showrooms and workshops, and the Korean head office. The model is the traditional Korean house: a central patio, courtyards and gardens, two terraces, one open to the sky facing the park, and a double-skin glass façade silkscreened with gold-and-white lines. The landscape consultant was Louis Benech.
Shanghai: the restoration
The third, opened in 2014, is Maison Hermès Shanghai: the fifth maison by RDAI, in a historic building of the early twentieth century that took six years to restore, with 1,174 square metres of selling and exhibition space.
Three answers
One is a new object in glass, one a house around a garden, and one a restored old building. What links them is the mixing of retail with galleries, cafés and workshops, which is also how the house runs its stores in Seoul’s flagship district.