To hear Thomas Heatherwick speak of architecture is to hear the Heatherwick Studio founder and General Director of the 2025 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism champion the importance of cultivating joy, warmth, and intimacy through design. In discussing the theme of the Seoul Biennale from Longchamp’s recently reimagined SoHo store, he spoke of the “emotional impact” the surfaces of buildings can have on passersby. “We’re interested, ultimately, about emotion, and I think we’ve underplayed that surface creates emotion, and that materiality and textures and detail and quirks can create emotion,”he says.
It was an apt observation to make from the Canapé Croissant couch on the second floor of Longchamp’s flagship, which Heatherwick recently reimagined with CEO Jean Cassegrain, twenty years after having worked with the late Philippe Cassegrain on the store’s first iteration.
With La Maison Unique, as the store has been known since it first opened in 2006, Heatherwick’s vision is resoundingly clear. Visitors enter to a kinetic staircase, where ribbons of steel punctuate rolling green undulations rendered in Longchamp’s signature Energy Green. Upstairs, the Canapé Croissant sofa is a central feature in the retail salon, along with a vintage 1948 Gio Ponti coffee table/Custom Lelièvre carpets unfold across the floors and columns as if through painterly brushstrokes. The boutique’s handbag selection is presented to visitors on oak display shelves that arch with corporeal grace—as if peeled from the ceiling above.
“I think sometimes we talk too much about places [that] must be beautiful,” says Heatherwick. “Actually, I think places need to be engaging. Interesting, generous, and fascinating. Our brains need fascination.”
To be sure, there is no shortage of fascination within La Maison Unique. Curios, including archival wooden pipes and leather trimmed game boards from the maison’s earliest days as a tobacconist and luxury leather goods house are on view alongside contemporary artworks like Cuts Cup Cut Down Column, a monolithic wooden sculpture by David Nash; Blended, a plissé-like ceramic object by Tanaka Tomomi; and Untitled II (Silver), a totemic chrome and porcelain sculpture by Bobby Silverman. The effect builds upon the legacy established by Heatherwick with the boutique’s first iteration—in which he and the Cassegrain family set out with the lofty goal of “redefining the retail experience.”
Skeptics may be inclined to raise an eyebrow, but the experience of meandering through the boutique as Heatherwick and the Cassegrain family have reimagined it indicates they may (still) be onto something. There are handbags and leather goods, sure, but there are fresh and ample moments of discovery, too.
“I’m more interested than ever in how to build buildings and places that can be adapted and can take change,” says Heatherwick of its potential longevity as he envisions two more decades. “What an honor to be part of 40 years of the history of this building, if that does happen. It’s a kind of relay race, society around us. We feel things are permanent, but they aren’t. We must cherish places if they’re meaningful to us, while we’re around, while they’re around.”
