Sophie Hicks Conjures an Exquisitely Tailored Space for Max Mara’s Flagship in Paris
The British architect’s latest stunning interior project joins a formidable roster of fashion heavyweights on Avenue Montaigne
The high fashion stores on the Avenue Montaigne, Paris’s major fashion street, are fitted out with priceless art, private salons, and even their own museums. But none has the view of the Eiffel Tower that greets visitors to the first floor of the redesigned Max Mara store on the corner of Montaigne and rue Clément Marot. The landmark iron spectacle seems so close you feel you could almost touch it.
At ground level, though, is another engineering delight. Through the boutique’s window, passersby can hardly miss a stunning staircase—a double helix of brilliant orange—curving elegantly upwards. “I want Monsieur Arnault to come out of the Louis Vuitton store opposite, and see this orange ribbon, and say ‘What on earth is that?’” says the British architect Sophie Hicks, who is responsible for the dramatic refit. She calls her staircase “a visual punch on the nose.”
Hicks has form in the fashion world. She worked as a fashion editor at British Vogue and Tatler and alongside Azzedine Alaïa, before deciding to study architecture at London’s Architectural Association. She designed her first store for Paul Smith in 1994 and went on to develop architectural concepts for Acne Studios, Chloe under Phoebe Philo, Mugler, and more. Max Mara stands out as her first full structural renovation in the French capital, since her store design for Yohji Yamamoto in 2010, and to it she has brought her trademark aesthetic: a tailored restraint and material delight that couldn’t be better suited to the Italian brand. “I wanted to shoot an unexpected Italian firework over Avenue Montaigne!” she says.
Hicks isn’t just talking about the fashion itself but her determined use of the finest Italian materials and craftsmanship. She now lives half the year in Venice, and this new project is in part a love letter to the skills she finds there. Stucco and terrazzo have been applied by masters from Padova and Vicenza. A display table over nine feet long is composed of 15 cast glass plates, painstakingly made by a master on the glass-making island of Murano. They sit atop a fine frame of luscious pink copper-plated steel.
On the opening day, Hicks is in the store, dressed in a light-grey double-breasted Max Mara jacket and blue poplin shirt. “Everything is about camel,” she exclaims, “a complete exploration of the color!” She is referring, of course, to the brand’s famous camel cashmere coats, not least the kimono-sleeved double-breasted 101801, which has been a wardrobe staple since it was first designed by Anne-Marie Beretta in 1981. In Hicks’s hands, though, camel has been pushed to both ends of its spectrum—from the high alert of the stair to a quiet shade for columns and a pale beige on bespoke narrow sofas upholstered in leather as smooth as silk. These are completed with handy terracotta armrests. “I hate little side tables that move around and can end up anywhere,” says Hicks. “These armrests dispense with any need for them.” Made exclusively for the store by Cassina, Hicks declares she’d like one for herself.
If the orange staircase is, for Hicks, camel turned up to top volume, it is not the only big move she has made. She has completely opened up the ground floor, with nothing but floor-to-ceiling glazing onto the street. In the first section, customers weave their way into the shop around 20 Max Mara-clad mannequins—it’s part fashion show, part vast vitrine. Offices on the first floor have given way to another elegantly unfolding sequence of spaces—a seemingly infinite stretch that eventually culminates in sparkling evening wear, one-off runway looks, and private areas.
Lighting, designed by experts at Arup, flushes across the ceiling, a sensor allowing it to gradually rise and fall from morning to dusk. Side-lit mirrors turn through several angles. This is an interior designed by a woman who delves hard into the details of what it’s like to shop. “It is a whole new concept for us,” says Maria Giulia Prezioso Maramotti. She is the third generation of the Maramotti family, who started the house in 1951 when Achille Maramotti decided to provide tailored, ready-to-wear for a new generation of Italian working women. “The brand is very special in the way it connects directly to what women want and need. The key factors are simplicity and substance; these are central to our values,” says Maramotti, whose title is Max Mara Fashion Group Board Member.
The Maramotti family is also known for its formidable art collection, from the Italian arte povera of the 1950s to important contemporary works. It is now housed in the original factory in Reggio Emilia, in northern Italy, and is open to the public. There is not, however, a single piece of art in the store—something that has become a trope of upmarket retail. Instead, the materials do the talking: the gleaming vanilla-white marmorino of the ceiling; the line of pale grey terrazzo set with white pebbles that borders the ground floor and the garden outside; thick panels of translucent glass flushed with a bruised-flesh pink. The clothing—in eau du nil satin, baby pink fine knit, crisp white cotton, and that brand-defining camel cashmere—provides the rest.
Outside, Hick’s horticultural collaborator Tania Compton, has planted 22 willow trees. “They will have grown and been cut into bushy pompom shapes by the time of couture in July,” says Hicks. “And by winter they will be deep red.” Perhaps Monsieur Arnault will take note of them, too .