Horse Play: Inside Hermès’ New Bond Street Home

The windows at Hermès’ new Bond Street home pay homage to its original client: the horse. Chic, yes, but delightfully witty too, says Charlotte Sinclair.

The Story Behind The Windows Of Hermès’ Bond Street Store

The opening of the new Hermès maison at 166 New Bond Street earlier this year heralded a new dimension in luxury retail. ‘Dimensions’ would be more accurate. The reimagined store – the result of a five-and-a-half-year renovation – brought six Grade II-listed houses, most dating back to the 1700s, into a cohesive entity. Parisian architecture studio RDAI, alongside Norman Foster‘s practice, was tasked with bringing contemporary rigour to these antique buildings. A tessellated glass and steel roof, reminiscent of the one Foster wrapped over the British Museum, floats over the store’s inner courtyard, where a sleek spiral staircase curls up from the atrium floor. Its calfskin leather handrail was hand-stitched by artisans recruited from Hermès’ own ateliers.

The store is a whopper, comprising 21,527 sq/ft of retail space, housed in 55 rooms across five floors, reached via four staircases. Each elegant nook and cranny is distinct, and distinctly British-inflected, with chairs by Soane Britain and elaborate botanical wallpapers by Katie Scott, plus art and artefacts borrowed from the collection of one of the label’s early presidents, Émile Hermès. Moving room to room, wall colours bleed from mustard yellow to straw, indigo to ice blue. Whimsical items create a dialogue between British and French culture: an Hermès pocket watch features the Mad Hatter riding a bicycle and the White Rabbit scrambling from a teapot lid. Naturally for a brand that sees beauty and value in longevity, there’s a restoration workshop on the third floor. Original features, including a 19th-century mosaic floor and a Victorian lift, have been meticulously preserved.

How best, then, to communicate all this tasteful splendour and irreproachable luxury to the world? More specifically, to the wealthy shoppers and idle gawpers that cruise this particularly salubrious stretch of pavement? Even in our digital-first age, shop windows remain a thing. Social media, after all, is a visual medium, and one that requires feeding with content – the more aspirational, the better. Occupying a strange space between entertainment and advertisement, enchantment and commerce, shop windows are a direct expression of how a brand sees itself and, more importantly, how it wishes to be seen. In this part of town, that expression is usually big with a capital ‘B’, with set designs as large and elaborate as any from a Hollywood movie. While impressive, these displays seem to affirm the idea of luxury fashion as an airless and fairly impenetrable business for the enjoyment of the chosen few.

Perhaps aware of this, Hermès took the opposite direction for the maison’s opening. Playing with the brand’s beginnings as a supplier of saddles and riding equipment, Hermès commissioned British textiles artist Kate Jenkins, known for her playful knitted objects, to create a horse-dressing salon for Hermès’ original equine client. This brilliantly bonkers brief tasked Jenkins with imagining a cosy, small-scale scenario using knitted shampoo bottles, crocheted bridles and a chandelier of knitted carrots to create a stable beauty salon – dubbed The Rocabarn after Hermès’ signature scent – fit for the showiest of show ponies.

When Jenkins, who is based in Brighton, received the call from Hermès, her excitement turned to panic. ‘I was thinking, “Will I be able to do it?”‘ She took a literal approach to figuring out the brief. ‘If I go and have my hair done as a horse, what would the hair salon look like? Originally, I had ideas of horses sitting under big hairdryers with rollers, wearing Hermès scarves as robes.’

Finally, she opted for a high-end stable where horses go to finesse their features. It’s a place where Birkins are stuffed with knitted carrots; horse tails are plaited with Hermès silks; knitted apples and sugar lumps scatter the straw stable floor; and a ‘hoof-icure’ area offers Hermès nail polish colours in specially designed, hoof-shaped bottles. Beauty products include Hot to Trot hoof oil, Shampony mane shine and High Horse tail spritz. A portrait of a horse is called Jane, after Jane Birkin.

The effect is unquestionably chic, but also witty in a way that feels inimitably British, evoking the gentle, knowing humour of, say, Wallace & Gromit. The preponderance of woolly novelties calls to mind the ambitious output of a local WI group. Who wouldn’t imagine themselves toting the brand’s Evelyne bag stuffed with crocheted roses? All is to charm and amuse.

The making, however, was a serious undertaking. ‘For eight weeks I was getting up at five and finishing at eight in the evening,’ says Jenkins. Questions as to how many carrots should hang from the chandelier began to haunt her dreams. ‘I live in Brighton, so I was working in London during the week, then getting the train back on a Friday and working on it over the weekends,’ she says, ‘and then crocheting flowers again on the 06.39 train up to London on Monday mornings. I think whenever a project is this big, every hour counts. You just put everything into it, heart and soul, to get that finished result and make it look amazing.’

Jenkins, who has worked on projects for brands from Anthropologie to Royal Mail and has held exhibitions across the globe, admits this is her most prestigious commission to date. ‘It’s like a dream. I just wanted to make a really beautiful piece of art that engaged the public, to have people looking at the window thinking, “Oh, what’s going on in there? What’s the story with all this?”‘

It’s a neat trick, creating a visual connection to the importance of craftsmanship in the Hermès story, while at the same time extending an invitation to feel welcome at what might be, to most, a fairly overwhelming square footage of prestige luxury shopping. It’s a feeling that’s echoed inside the store in smart sitting rooms where customers are encouraged to relax and feel at home. While clients wait for appointments in the handbag salon, tea is served in Hermès fine china.

Brits can be a curmudgeonly bunch, suspicious of shiny things and reflexively satirical of anything that’s perceived to take itself too seriously. Yet with a neat side trot and shake of mane, Jenkins’ display seems to repel cynicism. And if Hermès has a sense of humour, then perhaps, the windows suggest, it might be a luxury brand that speaks to people of a similar sensibility. ‘It’s nice to put a smile on somebody’s face,’ Jenkins says of watching passersby engage with the windows. ‘I think fashion and art should be fun. Life should be about having a laugh.’

Hermès, 166 New Bond Street, London W1S 1DP