Proenza Schouler’s SoHo House

Less than a month after they presented their “Domesticity”-themed Spring 2014 collection, Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough of Proenza Schouler quietly opened the doors to their new store in SoHo. The space, at at 121 Greene Street, was designed by architect David Adjaye of Adjaye Associates, who also designed the designers’ darkly seductive Madison Avenue shop as well as their offices. “We used the idea of a ‘façade within a façade’ — a courtyard at the entrance providing a pause between the street and the interior,” explains Adjaye. Many of the uptown store’s design features have found their way downtown, albeit in slightly lighter tones, for a softer, and overall homier feel. The floors are natural timber, display pedestals are poured concrete, and a pattern of alternating slabs of Kenya Black, Bardiglio, and Lilac marble line the walls, a reference, according to McCollough to vandalized urban facades. “The walls are almost patched up and defaced but done in an abstract way where marble is cut up into puzzle pieces first explored on Madison and reassembled,” he explains. “The idea of high and low design juxtaposed, of rawness and slickness, or matte and shine, of artificial elements meshed with completely organic ones, this idea of contradictions and juxtapositions, of something precious but undone are all values that ring true to the brand.” The dark wood chairs with tan leather upholstery dotting the space are a collaboration with McCollough’s younger brother Doug, a Los Angeles furniture designer who has created many pieces for the designers’ Broadway showroom. But perhaps the most distinct element of the new store is the 30-foot blackened steel screen, the triangular cutouts of which have become something of a Proenza Schouler trademark, appearing on bags, scarves, and shoes. The cutouts also reveal a dramatic terrazzo staircase that gives way to an in-store sunken tropical garden framed by two of the space’s existing cast iron columns. “I really came together with Jack and Lazaro on the approach to old and new,” says Adjaye, adding that they shared an “idea of how we wanted the existing structure and the contemporary design to be juxtaposed rather than blurred. That tension is evident in both stores.”