Louis Vuitton's luxury pit stop

New York: Being temporary in the world of luxury is still quite nice.

A new store by Louis Vuitton is opening near a stretch of Manhattan also known as Billionaires' Row. It's built to last for only a couple of years while the company renovates its flagship across the street.

Customers are greeted with a towering installation in the store's atrium, designed by Shohei Shigematsu, an architect at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture firm. Four sculptural pillars of stacked Louis Vuitton trunks climb toward the roughly 50-foot ceiling, reminiscent of a game of Tetris.

"Stepping into a Louis Vuitton store is about embarking on a journey," the CEO of Louis Vuitton, Pietro Beccari, said in an email.

During Beccari's tenure, Louis Vuitton has aggressively continued to position itself as a cultural brand. He featured tennis legends Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal hiking in the Dolomites for an advertising campaign this year. In 2023, he appointed producer Pharrell Williams as Louis Vuitton's men's creative director.

The house has also expanded into the world of dining and hospitality. It brought on board the acclaimed French chefs Arnaud Donckele and Maxime Frédéric to oversee various culinary ventures, including Le Café, a concept restaurant designed around what the house calls "luxury snacking."

For the New York City store, Le Café will include a bar and library space, seat up to 70 people, and offer dishes such as monogrammed savory waffles with caviar ($48), a cheeseburger ($32) and desserts like a Bartlett pear tart ($22). "It's the type of food that perfectly fits with shopping," Donckele said in an email. "You can stop and eat for five minutes just as easily as you can spend two hours at a table."

Louis Vuitton hired two chefs based in New York, the Michelin-starred Christophe Bellanca and Mary George of the restaurant Daniel. They began conceiving an American-specific menu a few months ago, while still working closely with Donckele and Frédéric. It's a model of crafting region-specific dining experiences that the house has adopted with other LVMH restaurants around the world, including Louis Vuitton's Le Café in Bangkok and Le Hall in Chengdu, China. Le Hall was awarded a Michelin star in September.

The library -- curated by Ian Luna, an editor and writer at the publishing house Rizzoli -- features more than 650 books devoted to food, art, architecture, travel and other topics (curiously, literature appears to be absent from the exhaustive selection), alongside the label's titles from its expanding publications department.

The same floor also has America's first Louis Vuitton chocolate bar. Made by Frédéric, the space features an assortment of sweets -- all from Paris -- that include bars with the house's famous checkerboard Damier print (starting at $32) and the brand's mascot, Vivienne Doudou, standing on a Louis Vuitton trunk ($375).

"The parallel between leather and craftsmanship in chocolate making is incredible," Frédéric said in an email. "Chocolate is like leather. The gestures are the same, with equal precision."

The store's first, second and third floors are still dedicated to good old-fashioned shopping for jewelry, accessories, menswear and womenswear. The fifth floor is reserved for private clients of the house and only available by appointment

Louis Vuitton's flagship store renovation disguised as stack of luggage trunks.

Louis Vuitton also designed an exclusive capsule collection for the store's opening -- featuring New York City colors such as taxicab yellow and imagery like skyscrapers and New York City license plates. Hot stamp machines and artisans are available near the luggage and handbag sections, should customers wish to customize their Louis Vuitton items upon purchase.

The location at 6 E. 57th St. was home to a Niketown, and its exposed brick walls and collegiate-looking seals on the wall are a reminder of the space's former inhabitants. More recently, the location was used as a temporary Tiffany's store while the neighboring flagship underwent a massive renovation. In 2021, LVMH acquired Tiffany's.

The brand did not say whether the contents of the temporary store are an indicator of what will be in its permanent flagship, which will open soon.

Louis Vuitton was one of the first fashion houses to conceive of artist-driven collaborations. Displays near each floor's elevators highlight the partnerships with Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami, Supreme, Yayoi Kusama and Richard Prince.

"Bringing culture into our spaces isn't something new to Louis Vuitton," Beccari said. "It's an essential part of our heritage."