Chanel Retail & Corporate Fashion Headquarters (New York City, New York)

 office building, clothes store / boutique, cosmetics shop

17-story postmodern office building originally completed in 1923 as 6-story building. Chanel moved here in 1993, and a new facade designed by Platt Byard Dovell White Architects was completed in 2006, with new floors on top. It is clad in grey granite, steel, and glass. A further renovation in 2016 expanded the retail space, previously confined to the lower two floors, to floors 1-7. The upper floors of the building contain a combination of retail, office and storage space, and is likely the location of their super-exclusive sample sales.

Chanel S.A. is the French house of high fashion that specializes in haute couture and ready-to-wear clothes, luxury goods, and fashion accessories. In her youth, the couturière Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel gained the soubriquet “Coco” while a chanteuse de café in provincial France. As a fashion designer, Coco Chanel catered to women’s taste for elegance in dress, with blouses and suits, trousers and dresses, and jewelry (gemstone and bijouterie) of simple design, that replaced the opulent, over-designed, and constrictive clothes and accessories of 19th-century fashion. Historically, the House of Chanel is most famous for the stylistically versatile “little black dress”, the perfume No. 5 de Chanel and the Chanel Suit.

The 3-story base has a glass lobby door and a service door at the ends of the ground floor, with a glass storefront in the middle that has a central glass double-door below a small, black metal canopy. The retail entry and the display-windows on either side are topped by an illuminated white band, with another (narrower) white band between the 2nd & 3rd floors. The 3rd floor has one large plate-glass window, while the shorter 2nd floor is separated into smaller windows between the stone end piers.

The midsection has end bays with steel-framed single-windows, and the center section has two joined bays of wider steel-framed windows. The windows all have grey stone spandrels separating the floors. There is a setback above the 11th floor, with the top floors matching those below at the center section, but with no window openings at the end bays. The exposed upper part of the west elevation is also clad in grey granite, and has four bays of square windows at the 12th-16th floors.

www.chanel.com/