Harry Winston

 commercial building, jewelry store/shop

5-story commercial building originally completed in 1872 as a townhouse. Designed by Charles Duggin and James Crossman, it was just one of many such townhouses put up by the duo in the area in the 1870s, and has since undergone at least five major renovations, altering its appearance.

In 1877 the furniture manufacturer Charles Baudouine bought the corner house, and in 1896 the ground floor was converted into a clothing store. Charles Duveen, a member of the London family of antiques dealers, took over 718 Fifth, in 1913 hiring the architect Henry Otis Chapman to give it a new front in the neo-Classical style, with rusticated blocks of stone or terra-cotta. Corning Glass, founded in 1851, bought the old Baudouine house in 1936. he company retained William and Geoffrey Platt, sons of the gentry architect Charles Platt, to work with its designer, John Gates. Completed in 1937, the rebuilt house was fresh with novelty, giant panels of 3,800 ridged glass blocks set within sheer walls of sculptured limestone. It wasn’t modernism so much as moderne-ism, the term applied to the streamlined period of late Art Deco.

In 1959 the jeweler Harry Winston bought the old Corning Building and made it over again the next year. Published accounts give the architect as Jacques Régnault, who stripped the limestone and glass block and replaced it with travertine and picture windows, forming an 18th-century French-style facade. In 2011, the dingy facade was cleaned, returning it to the original creamy color of 1960.

Facing the avenue the tall ground floor has a central, nearly double-height round-arch with beveled edges and recessed glass door below a glass, black wrought-iron, and gilded ornamented transom and fanlight, with a scrolled keystone. There are lanterns on stylized wrought-iron pedestals flanking the doorway, and a narrow display-window on either side. Above these windows, on either side of the arch, is a large roundel. A band course caps the ground floor, and a brown granite water table is located at the sidewalk level.

The upper floors have three bays of single-windows, each with a sharply-sloped navy-blue canvas awning covering the upper half. The 2nd-floor windows are taller, with iron railings covered the bases of the windows that extend down to the band course below. A pair of flagpoles projects from the end piers at the 2nd floor. A stone cornice marks the roof line.

The north facade on 56th Street has a row of eight round-arches at the west end; each contains a display-window except for the end bay at the west, which has an entrance breaking the granite water table. It has glass and wrought-iron double-doors. A ninth arch at the east end is set farther apart, and has the recessed, beveled edges seen on the east facade's arch. The upper floors match those on the avenue, but spanning 10 bays.

Winston was among the most famous jewelers in the world, well-known to the general public. In the 1953 musical film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the song "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" includes the spoken interjection "Talk to me, Harry Winston, tell me all about it!" The Lauren Weisberger comic novel, Chasing Harry Winston, was published in May 2008.

Today, the Harry Winston Diamond Corporation operates eight salons in the U.S., in New York, Beverly Hills, Las Vegas, Dallas, Honolulu, Bal Harbour, Chicago, and Costa Mesa and seventeen salons in other countries. The luxury brand segment includes sales from Harry Winston salons, which are located in prime markets around the world, including eight salons in the United States.

Harry Winston is owned by Toronto-based Harry Winston Diamond Corporation, which holds a 40% interest in the Diavik Diamond Mine, located in Canada's Northwest Territories. Harry Winston, Inc. has retail locations (called "salons") in more than twenty cities worldwide, including here at its flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York, and also in Beverly Hills, Paris, London, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Singapore.

www.harrywinston.com/