Francisco Costa Builds a World of His Own

After designing at Gucci under Tom Ford, and later spending over a decade as the womenswear creative director of Calvin Klein, Francisco Costa‘s interests extended into architecture, interiors, and objects. Costa Brazil’s new Hudson Yards flagship gives him room to explore all three. Designed with his longtime friend and collaborator Alexander May, the roughly 3,000-square-foot space borrows from Costa’s own apartment, with cement, warm copper, books, furniture, and objects he has collected over the years. Much of what visitors see belongs to Costa personally. “I’ve always been very emotionally attached to houses,” Costa tells Surface. “Architecture is one thing that I’m so obsessed with. I love it.”

In his home, Costa constantly moves things around. A chair might shift from one room to another. An object finds a new position. Something that has been sitting in the same place for years suddenly looks different. He wanted the store to have that same quality, with furniture and modular elements that can be easily rearranged.

The Brazilian influence is there, too. The copper and bronzed surfaces contrast the cement, while high ceilings give the space an almost outdoor feeling. “The warmth of the metal, the copper, just brings in that sort of sunny, warmed-up, bronzed kind of spirit,” Costa says. “But then you have these brutalist cement walls, which make it very Brazilian.”

There are two lounge areas, plenty of breathing room, and relatively little of the visual clutter often associated with beauty retail. Rather, the idea is to encourage guests to linger. Costa explains, “It’s more of a space, a lounge.”

The store has already begun to operate that way. Since opening, it has hosted nine events encompassing fragrance, sustainability, Indigenous entrepreneurship, and Brazilian culture. A conversation with the Fragrance Foundation looked at the sourcing behind Costa Brazil’s ingredients and the role of breu, the Amazonian resin that runs through the brand’s fragrance vocabulary. Another gathering brought together Indigenous women entrepreneurs to talk about building their businesses and finding their voices.

That sense of openness also appeared in Costa Brazil’s early image-making. Rather than working exclusively in the controlled environment of a studio, Costa and his team spent 10 days in Rio de Janeiro with photographers and videographers, walking through the city, meeting people, and inviting them into the brand’s world. The Hudson Yards store feels like an extension of that approach: personal, collected, and unfinished. After spending much of his career building worlds for other fashion houses, this one happens to be designed by him, for him.