DeMellier opens first store on Sloane Square, styled as a home

DeMellier is opening its first stand-alone store, taking over Hugo Boss's former home on London's Sloane Square. The space opens on Saturday, ahead of the luxury handbag brand's tenth anniversary next year. It is the company's first shop of its own after years of online and department store sales.

Founder Mireia Llusia-Lindh brought in Nicolas Schuybroek, a residential architect, to shape a room that reads as a stylish private house. The 3,230-square-foot space runs over two floors, with the ground level meant to resemble a living room and bags placed on marble shelves like design objects.

The ground level has fabric-covered club chairs, dark tables made from glazed Italian lava stone, ceramics and books. Original work by female artists is shown alongside photography and architecture volumes. Handbags are placed within niches and on furniture, discovered gradually as one walks through.

How the two floors are arranged

The lower floor is styled as a dining room: a long dark table of reclaimed wood with chairs by the French designer Pierre Chapo. The plan is to host dinners and conversations with friends of the brand. A linen-covered wall nearby plays a film of artisans making bags at DeMellier factories in Italy and Spain.

On that same floor is a craft corner, a large bespoke chest of drawers wrapped in the identical leather used for the brand's logo-less, streamlined bags. Each drawer holds a story of making: leather-cutting tools, curved needles, and swatches showing the different stitching that goes into the product.

Throughout, the fit-out combines oak floors, mineral plaster walls, raw travertine shelves and linen accents. Furniture comes from Axel Einar Hjorth, George Nakashima and Lina Bo Bardi, with calm tone-on-tone abstract paintings upstairs and downstairs by the British painter Susan Gunn.

Llusia-Lindh said she wanted the space warm and tactile, a welcome to the women who already buy her bags. "This is the first time our customers can truly step inside our world," she said. "The flagship gives us the opportunity to meet them in person, welcome them into our home."

The founder was direct about what she wanted to avoid. Most retail spaces feel impersonal, she argued, a bit like a museum and very glossy. "I wanted this store to convey our values and to be a place you want to spend time in," she said, elevated but still approachable, which is why she chose Schuybroek.

Schuybroek described the store as a sequence of inhabited rooms, the bags treated almost as collected objects moving shelf to shelf. His aim was an interior warm, tactile and quiet, where architecture and the range become one domestic landscape rather than display cases.

The business behind the store

The brand has built its following on quiet luxury and an all-female design team. Llusia-Lindh said the designs should complement women rather than overshadow them, which gives the aesthetic its timelessness. The Princess of Wales is a regular wearer of the Mini Hudson handle-top bag.

Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Meryl Streep have also been photographed with large and small versions of its styles. The London company ended its financial year in July with revenue of £56 million, and it is profitable. It is backed by The Equity Studio, founded by Anna Sweeting.

DeMellier began as a direct-to-consumer business and still makes 80 percent of sales online. The remaining fifth comes through stores including Galeries Lafayette, Neiman Marcus, Net-a-porter, Selfridges and Mytheresa. Llusia-Lindh cut out middlemen early, going straight to factories to keep luxury without high prices.

The leathers are byproducts of the food chain, and the company never destroys unsold pieces, reusing or donating leftover material to local apprentice schools. The new Sloane bag, folded leather with no visible stitching, costs £585 for the large version and £540 for the smaller one, both in gold-rated Italian leather.

The Sloane style is exclusive to the store. The brand's charitable arm, A Bag, A Life, donates a portion of every sale to SOS Children's Villages to fund vaccines and treatments for children. In-store customers get a personalised card showing how their purchase contributes.

Shoppers also take home a leather key-chain, which can be embossed with their initials at the craft corner downstairs. Llusia-Lindh said London is only the start, with stand-alone stores planned in other major cities alongside department store concessions.

She called the London shop a learning experience and said she cannot wait to start meeting customers in person. The leather used for the Leather Working Group gold rating comes from Italy, where DeMellier also has a factory.

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Images: DeMellier