
Two weeks ago, Herman Miller treated the architecture and design crowd to a proper grand opening party for its new, New York City flagship store. The party, attended by around a thousand people, was the perfect event to shake up the chilling mid-February blues.
The space is all things past, present and future Herman Miller – and drippingly gorgeous.
More importantly, the new flagship store catapults Herman Miller into a true lifestyle brand space on a more physical level. The store is Herman Miller’s first consumer-facing storefront in North America since the 1960s.
The “new” space is actually the same building that Herman Miller design luminary George Nelson worked in from the 1940s through to the 1970s, on the top-most floor where the Maharam design studio now sits.
Herman Miller had previously occupied separate spaces for each of its brand segments – Herman Miller consumer and Design Within Reach, Herman Miller contract, Geiger and Maharam. In its new space, the company is putting into practice its Living Office concept, set across a full eight floors of the building.
“Our design goal was to bring all of those brands under one roof, not only internally for our teams to better align, but also for consumers,” says Ben Watson, executive creative director of Herman Miller. “We wanted to connect each of these brands and the people who work here to a consumer-facing store on the ground floor.”
Once inside on the ground floor, guests will fall down a rabbit hole of Herman Miller home and lifestyle products, all thoughtfully integrated to feel like a true home.
“With the retail store for consumers, we tried to imagine a house that people are actually living in, instead of building a series of imaginative vignettes,” said Mr. Watson. “We will regularly change the ‘house,’ just as families would move out and new families would move in.”
Herman Miller opened a small consumer-facing store in Tokyo a few years ago, and its success led the brand to explore an expanded storefront presence for the future. The New York City space is a “flagship” in every sense of the word – a space Herman Miller will revolve around and use to expand in new ventures.
The second floor also focuses on home design, and levels two through five act as a showroom for the contract market. About 200 Herman Miller team members work in the building, which has sat mostly vacant for decades prior.
“We’re investing a great deal into this experience in New York, and we want to learn from it. We imagine that we could use these learnings and potentially apply them to new spaces.”