It’s a sunny September morning in Paris, and there’s something to be said for Rue Mont Thabor—an anonymous street between Rue Rivoli and Rue Saint-Honoré in the shadow of the Louvre, lined with boutiques for Balenciaga, Armani, Moynat, Burberry, and more. Look especially light-hearted.
This is especially true at 1 Rue du Mont Thabor, on the corner of Rue d’Alger. I was greeted at the door by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, both wearing long black dresses of their own design, accessorized with dazzling but simple antique jewelry, with smiles from ear to ear on their faces. At last, they were about to realize their longtime dream of opening a store in Paris for their brand, The Row. It would be no exaggeration to say that it has been a long time coming.
“We’ve been looking for it for several years, but then we just kept looking everywhere,” Ashley says, taking me in. Then, 18 months ago, a friend introduced us to this place.
They loved that it wasn’t a cookie-cutter boutique—it was once a restaurant that the twins would quietly go to check out when deciding whether to accept—and that it was on a corner and fitted with lots of huge windows. “Having so many windows is a great thing, but it’s also a challenge, because Ashley and I don’t like putting anything on the windows,” Mary-Kate laughs. With Lilou Marquand Design, they’re so fascinated with Lilou Marquand’s work, and she has a pedigree, too—she once assisted Coco Chanel. Yet the Olsens also recognized that their Paris store was part of a vibrant community, and while the shutters would be open, during the day the windows would allow passersby to see what was inside, while at night the space would be illuminated to make it feel like home.
Ashley said, “It will be a great experience for the community – a feeling that the store is local.” Likewise, they are committed to making sure that everyone who comes here – whether or not they are one of the people who enjoy buying and wearing their clothes – feels cared for and looked after. “We want this experience to be unique and special,” she said. “Their experience is as important to us as anything else we do.”
In its own way, this location is a perfect example of how skillfully and thoughtfully the Olsen sisters brought The Row to its current location. It also helps explain how the brand recently attracted a controversial round of funding, reported to be worth nearly $1 billion, underscoring the brand’s extraordinary power and influence, and how seriously it’s taken as a business: Mary-Kate and Ashley manage to simultaneously be at the heart of things — both in Paris and the larger fashion world — while also, in their own way, quietly and uniquely finding a home within it.
As we began our tour, what was immediately impressive was that the place felt cozy and almost informal — well, as cozy as any place decorated with fine, museum-quality furniture, rugs, and objects from the mid-20th century — and soon — well, it was. The working atmosphere here is intimate and deeply personal, looking sophisticated without feeling precious.
I asked them if it would be nice if, when they add another store to this one (they’re now in Los Angeles, the Hamptons, New York, and London), their newest outpost (opening September 24) is clearly connected to the other stores. Important. “Does it look like The Row store to you?” Mary Kate asked, smiling. “Because we just moved in.” Yes, aesthetically and atmospherically, it’s true. The last time I wrote about a new store at The Rose (in New York, which opened almost nine years ago), I mentioned that I wanted to burn everything I own and live in it. Also, I had to take a crash course in learning French. (Honestly, a small price to pay.)
It took months of hard work to get to their current store in Paris — a painstaking process of peeling, stripping, dismantling that had the sisters stopping every three weeks and checking in on how things were going, at times surprising them and their team of in-house design consultants along the way. It was the first store to be designed this way, and the Olsen family had previously hired renowned interior designer Jacques Grange to help bring their vision to life. “The best way to describe the whole process,” Ashley says, “is as a series of small steps that we completed with a group of people who were excited to try it out with us.”
In its previous days as a restaurant, the space was made up of several smaller interlocking restaurants with a walled-off kitchen in the middle. Through the renovation, however, the building’s true footprint slowly became clear. “We didn’t see before that it could be such an open space,” Ashley said. “Everything was so closed off, but we started to see more opportunities for flow.” There are also some wonderful original features that at first glance didn’t feel like they belonged together, but somehow, now, magically fit together. “We wanted to maintain the integrity of the floors, the columns, the walls,” she added, “keeping all the elements and making them consistent.”
This is evident in the way in which the various elements have been synthesised in harmony – through the open industrial pipes on which the clothes are stored, through the large rustic carved stone entrance leading to the back of the shop; at the time of the renovation, shamefully neglected because it was covered up, to the absolutely wonderful old and aged wooden columns protruding from floor to ceiling looking like they came from a Victorian schooner. (In one corner, its echo is a new addition: a columnar wooden base designed by furniture designer Marcel Cord.)
Unlike many boutiques, which seek to surprise and amaze by exuding luxury and status before welcoming you with a (rather incongruous) array of products that defeats the whole intention, there is no such strategy here: the store opens directly onto a welcoming, almost restrained seating area, where two 1940s wooden Treno chairs, designed by Victor Coutre, combine a plain rush seat with a geometric backrest next to a 1955 black Georges Jouve coffee table.
As you walk through the tall stone entrance behind them, you’re greeted by some comfortable custom seating that’s very California in spirit, and a 1930s modernist coffee table by Michel Dufet (my eyes literally popped out of my head (The Bearded Man’s Wife)), an early 1950s Pablo Picasso ceramic pitcher that Ashley wisely placed when the water was handed to us all so it goes into a spot on the floor.
The tour then continues through an arched opening into the adjoining room, which houses two Henrik Wooda armchairs upholstered in chenille gold velvet, a retro concept counter that now houses his beloved leather purses, and — even more dazzling, I can’t lie — a gorgeous 1934 rust-and-beige Ivan da Silva Bruhns rug.
Mary Kate opened the door to a dressing room and the three of us peered in. Inside is a 1900s ivory lacquered rectangular chair by Koloman Moser and Wiener Werkstätte, and a pair of 1940s white wheat ear candlesticks by Vadim Androsov. Next to the espresso bar is another dressing room with a 1950s-style coffee machine stocked with tiny ceramic cups that the sisters bought from a commune in Los Angeles.
To get there you have to pass a beautiful steel door with six small portholes and beautiful old wood on the other side of the door. It reminded me of the decor of Le Duc, a fish restaurant on the Left Bank, stylish and delicious, whose design is particularly reminiscent of a 1970s yacht. “Was this ever part of the kitchen?” I asked the Olsens at the door. Mary-Kate answered, barely missing a beat: “I’m Jean Prouvé.”
Uh-oh. This reminds me of the time several years ago, just before the holidays, when I went to interview Ann Demeulemeester at her Le Corbusier-designed home in Antwerp. She and I wandered into her studio, where one of the cutting tables was hung with a series of dangling wire hangers—like the kind you buy from the dry cleaner—shaped exactly like a Christmas tree. “What a wonderful holiday decoration,” I said to Ann. “It was written by Man Ray,” Demeulemeester expressed disappointment. Again, uh-oh. The sisters laughed as I recounted yet another moment of my aesthetic ignorance. “But it would be a wonderful holiday decoration,” Mary-Kate said.
Now that we’re back to the custom-made couch (and that Picasso jug), we’ve reflected extensively on what it means to open in Paris. They trusted their unerring instincts — instincts they were too modest to say they did, but they did: “We weren’t really trying to perfect things,” Mary-Kate said. “We’re just trying to get a sense” of what Parisians would want to buy from them and what would fly. “We’ll have specialty pieces there,” she said, “but we think it will be more informal.”
“We just want to stay open because when you’re open, you learn so much,” Ashley said as we concluded. “You need to be very agile and make adjustments, so open the door and learn one day at a time… that’s who we are. It’s probably not the most obvious place in Paris – we’ve been on almost every main street in the city – but we’re happy here.
