Museum-Quality Retail

LOS ANGELES — Melrose Avenue has become Los Angeles’s latest hotbed of fashion, with outposts of Marc Jacobs, Oscar de la Renta, and Carolina Herrara competing for attention. But New Yorkers visiting here will also find a storefront to make them feel right at home: Moss, the pioneering design store.Setting up shop in an unlikely neighborhood is an old trick for owner Murray Moss, who in 1994 opened his SoHo storefront near two of New York’s biggest art galleries. It might have seemed a strange choice for a furniture retailer, but it worked: Since its founding, Moss has become a $25 million-a-year brand that influenced the aesthetics of design retailing.The location of the original store was chosen for its proximity to the heart of SoHo’s gallery district. Inspired by the proximity to art, Mr. Moss created a new retail aesthetic that has proved so successful that when the Museum of Modern Art initiated its $425 million makeover, it used his store as the model for its design galleries. What the Moss store introduced in 1994 was a straddling of the boundaries between commerce and curating. The walls are museum white, and the aesthetic is more curatorial than mercantile. While all products in the store are for sale, their artists and sale information is located on the wall as a museum label would be. Designers tend to be featured for a period of months, and most products are behind glass or on pedestals. Placards warning “Do Not Touch” are common.Today, stores across the country are patterned on Moss’s industrial design aesthetic. But as galleries are getting priced out of the SoHo, Moss has been surrounded by high-end fashion and home goods stores. Jonathan Adler, Kartell, and Armani Casa are now all successful neighbors to the Greene Street shop.Mr. Moss and Franklin Getchell, his business partner, have expanded the New York Moss store into three parts, with Moss Gallery and Moroso at Moss, all accessible within the original location of 150 Greene Street. Around the corner is Centovini, a Moss-designed classical Italian restaurant with a 100-bottle wine list, that Messrs Moss and Getchell also own.On Friday, Moss opened the West Coast satellite location at 8444 Melrose — and he chose this fashion-centric neighborhood on purpose. “I didn’t want the store to be in the ghetto of the home furnishings district. Because you never get out of it,” he said. “All I ask for is free eyes. The closest I could get to that would be fashion. Fashion people bring a much broader perspective.”Although the New York store is now surrounded by fashion — Prada, Louis Vuitton, and Chanel are all nearby — Mr. Moss is determined to keep the new store from being a replica of what he and Mr. Getchell created in New York. “I want it to be something additional for the people who know us in the world,” he said. “I want them to say ‘Did you see the one in L.A.? You have to go.'”Moss Angeles, as it is affectionately known, has been designed with the differences between the two cities in mind. Both stores are meant to attract passers-by, but in Los Angeles, the viewer is in a car, and it seemed natural to attract a driver with a billboard. The Los Angeles store has been fitted with two large, glittering signs emblazoned in the Moss logo.The expansion is a major step for Mr. Moss, who is notoriously fastidious about his New York shop. The exhibits are redesigned when he sees fit, and the white walls freshly painted weekly. Perhaps counterintuitively, Mr. Moss sees the expansion as proof of how his business is getting smaller. As many businesses try to expand globally, Mr. Moss’s interests are becoming more localized. When he opened his first shop in 1994, he was dealing in industrial design. With mass production, these goods could be purchased in one location and sent anywhere. But as his business expanded, Mr. Moss has been drawn to more goods and artists who are creating fewer products and do so locally. Now with artists creating one-offs and exclusive pieces for his store, he is finding himself to be the sole representative of these objects and taking on additional responsibility. “To represent this object for the whole world,” he said. “You want to take it further into the world.”To illustrate his artists across the country, Moss found it fitting that his physical presence be felt on both coasts. “If we’re going to offer things across the United States, then we’ll have to go across the United States. Los Angeles is the farthest you can go from New York, and yet it’s the closest you can get in every other way.”Mr. Moss will retain his curatorial style and hopes that the Los Angeles version will have the same positive effect on its surroundings as the New York store. He is looking forward, however, to seeing how the stores evolve and change over time. “The only way to expand from a shop with a strong identity in one city is to completely move away from that identity,” he says. “But how different could it be? Because I’m still Murray.”

Museum-Quality Retail

Museum-Quality Retail

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