A new Taschen bookstore has opened, exactly where you might expect it to open, in the heart of SoHo. Surely this outlet, designed by Philippe Starck and consecrated to the sale of books on art and design, would have made little sense in Midtown and none at all on the Upper East Side. But SoHo, once the center of the contemporary art scene, before it moved to Chelsea, has reinvented itself in recent years as the North American hub of trendiness in design. Especially on weekends, the streets of SoHo become impassible with those eager to partake of the finer things in life, and the new store — at 107 Greene Street — will surely answer to their needs.

And what is high-concept design if not high art for the masses? Most people, after all, can’t afford a $2 million Lucian Freud, but an Ingo Maurer lamp — well, most people can’t afford that either. But at the very least, most people can afford a book about both, and everyone can afford a tome by Taschen.

That is because, over the past quarter century, since 1980 to be precise, Benedickt Taschen has become a rich man by giving consumers attractive, well printed, and inexpensive volumes on fine art, architecture, and design. Though more established — and costly — art publishers will tell you that Taschen books are manifestly printed on the cheap, I have not sensed any unwarranted cutting of corners in their elegant books, nor for that matter have I found that volumes by more established houses like Abrams and Rizzoli are substantially more sumptuous or better designed.

Another gripe you hear, usually in hushed tones, is that Taschen’s real profit comes from its stylized pornography, which seems a far likelier proposition. But Taschen is not exactly hiding this aspect of its enterprise: In its newest catalog the firm proudly declares its focus in “Art, Anthropology and Aphrodesia.” Such erotica, pornography, or whatever, aspires to cultural consequence by reprinting vintage smut from the 1950s and ’60s. As the art world becomes ever more pornographic, so pornography itself comes to seem almost artistic. Along with photo albums from such recent masters of transgression as Richard Kern and Jan Saudek, the new store also sells a six-volume “History of Girly Magazines, 1900 to 1969,” as well as “The Big Book of Breasts.”

But it really doesn’t matter what is being sold here, since the overriding point is that sooner or later, everyone can be, must be, and will be assimilated to that gaseous and immaterial essence known as lifestyle. Mr. Taschen and Mr. Starck, in their relentless cultivation of their lifestyle, have been indispensable to one another: This is the third store Mr. Starck has designed for the firm, the first being in Paris, on the Rue de Buci, the second in Beverly Hills. In the meantime, the Taschen monograph on the man — in which he appears on the cover with his head backwards — has been a vector of his fame all the way from Tokyo and Berlin to Chicago and Buenos Aires.

The specifics of the lifestyle with which Mr. Starck and Mr. Taschen are associated is a textbook embodiment of Eurotrash. Taschen books are as apt to be published in French and Italian as in English and German, with translations into Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. At the same time, there is an obsessive interest in America, but the sort of mythologized America that lives mainly in the imagination of Europeans, a honky-tonk America of cowboys and diners, of blues singers, hippies, and barflies.

And so it is fitting that Mr. Starck’s designs in general, and his work for the new Taschen flagship in particular, should represent the collision of an austere and chastened European aesthetic and the uncorsetted freedom and brash newness associated with America. The store consists of a unified space that extends from the street all the way back to the edge of the building and is interrupted only by stands that display the books for sale. Along its yellow walls is a sequence of bookcases that tilt forward and that, in a typical high-art reference, recall the monolithic minimalism of sculptor Donald Judd. But the spatial austerity of the place is immediately betrayed by what is going on along the walls, a massive, candy-colored, and entirely free-flowing group of abstractions confected by the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes.

On the whole, this space works because, although it surely draws attention to itself and to its good taste, it is sufficiently reticent and demure to provide a fitting context in which to display the books on sale. On the whole, it is not as virtuosic an exercise in taste and lifestyle as Mr. Starck’s summa, the Hudson Hotel over at 58th Street and Ninth Avenue. But any space designed by Mr. Starck is something of an event, and anything he designs in Manhattan must be seen as an enhancement of New York itself.

jgardner@nysun.com