RH Paris, Unveiled: A Seven-Story Gallery of Design, Dining, and Drama on the Champs-Élysées
- Luxe magazine Switzerland
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
RH Paris, Unveiled: A Seven-Story Gallery of Design, Dining, and Drama on the Champs-Élysées
The Champs-Élysées has a new stage and it isn’t a fashion house or a hotel. It’s RH Paris, The Gallery on the Champs-Élysées, a seven-level fusion of architecture, art, interiors, and hospitality that opened to the public on September 5, 2025, just as Paris Design Week began. Behind gilded gates at 23 avenue des Champs-Élysées, the American design brand presents its most ambitious European statement yet: a 3,900-square-meter universe where a design library greets you with rare tomes, lighting twinkles like jewelry, a glass elevator appears and vanishes like stagecraft, and restaurants serve Champagne and caviar beneath luminous white onyx. It is retail as cultural theater and it is unmistakably Paris.
A new Paris address with history and intent
The building itself dates to 1983, commissioned by aviation pioneer Marcel Dassault, and more recently known to shoppers as the former Abercrombie & Fitch flagship. RH’s arrival retains the site’s ceremonial entry: past an ornate, gold-leafed wrought-iron gate and down a 150-foot limestone, hedge-lined path to a hidden garden. The gesture is pure Paris: a private-domain reveal that delays gratification and frames the brand’s world as something you enter, not merely browse. Inside, a soaring atrium threads the seven floors with cast medallion stairs and a golden glow.
Paris is not RH’s first European foray England’s Aynho Park arrived in 2023 but the Champs-Élysées location is different in temperature and tempo. It places RH in dialogue with the city’s grand boulevard, where luxury increasingly performs as experience. The timing aligns with Paris Design Week and Maison&Objet, pulling a global design audience through the doors.
Architecture as choreography
There is a theatrical current to the gallery’s key moves. RH worked with Foster + Partners on a series of interventions that read like choreographed reveals. The RH Interior Design Studio sits in a freestanding, glass-encased pavilion an almost civic gesture on the garden side where a bespoke installation by Alison Berger refracts light like crystalline perfume stoppers. Step into the entrance hall and you meet the Architecture & Design Bibliothèque, anchored by one of the earliest modern printings (c.1521) of Vitruvius’s De Architectura—a literal citation of proportion and order. On the first level, the mood shifts to gallery: antiques and artifacts share the stage with works such as abstract nudes by German painter Thomas Junghans, establishing art as an equal partner to furniture. Even the ceilings perform: a hand-gilded field of gold leaf by Ateliers Gohard amplifies the atrium’s light.
The showstopper is above. A glass-and-brass rooftop elevator conceived by Foster + Partners as a “now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t” pop-up emerges from an invisible shaft to deliver guests to a landscaped aerie with views of the Eiffel Tower, Grand Palais, and the avenue below. It feels less like a store and more like a civic belvedere, a new vantage point on the capital.
Hospitality woven into the gallery
RH Paris is the brand’s first European gallery with fully integrated hospitality concepts: two restaurants, a bar & lounge, and a rooftop moment that reframes the city. Le Jardin RH (second floor) occupies a soaring conservatory of curved glass and steel, with white onyx from bar to bath giving the room a sculptural clarity. The World of RH Bar & Lounge (third floor) layers merino-velvet comfort with archival drawings, photographs, and digital installations cocktail in hand folding the company’s broader narrative into the Paris experience. Le Petit RH (fourth floor) concentrates the brand’s culinary signatures into an intimate, 43-seat room of Champagne onyx and crescent banquettes, crowned by a custom Chiara chandelier of 7,200 hand-blown glass polyhedrons. Taken together, the sequence is unmistakably hospitality yet it remains tethered to design and craft.
Menus, meanwhile, speak Paris fluently caviar, seafood towers, classic roasts, French wines and tilt toward the sort of celebratory dining that encourages lingering (and by extension, immersion in the gallery’s design world). The program isn’t an add-on; it’s the circulatory system that keeps people moving between ideas, materials, and rooms.
From retail to cultural platform
Industry watchers have described RH Paris as a culmination: the company’s long evolution from a catalog brand into a placemaker a curator of interiors, landscapes, hospitality, and now urban moments. The opening was September 5, 2025 for the public, with VIP previews the day prior; media framed it as RH’s most ambitious European gallery to date and, in CEO Gary Friedman’s own phrasing, a kind of “Mona Lisa” for the brand. The statement lands because Paris measures ambition by more than square meters; it measures it by how places feel and how they hold together over time.
If the brand’s earlier European iteration in England was a country-house campus, Paris is an urban salon. It compresses RH’s vocabulary antiques and contemporary craftsmanship; rare books and new lighting; dining rooms and rooftop gardens into a single vertical narrative. The strategy mirrors a broader luxury shift from transaction to experience: galleries and flagships as cultural destinations that reward curiosity, photography, and repeat visits.
Why the Champs-Élysées matters
The address is symbolic. The Champs-Élysées is a boulevard of myth and reinvention, where global brands routinely attempt destination-making. RH’s choice of the former Abercrombie & Fitch site is telling: the property already offered a theatrical forecourt and a separation from the street that lends itself to hospitality and display. The retrofit is notable for its restraint the building’s monumental bronze-and-brass doors, for instance, are not replaced but recontextualized, while the central stair gains a backlit, frosted-glass “float” that refreshes the promenade without erasing memory. The brand’s 3,900-square-meter footprint also gives Paris a new hybrid typology part library, part gallery, part club less a store than a cultural interior.
The visitor’s path
A first visit might unfold like this. You enter through the iron gate and garden perhaps a glass of Champagne collected from the wine bar within Le Jardin RH and drift beneath the gold leaf into the Bibliothèque. A figure a 19th-century bronze caryatid attributed to Louis-Félix Chabaud anchors the atrium like a guardian. You pass abstract canvases by Junghans and vignettes of RH Modern and RH Interiors. A conversation with a designer in the glass pavilion becomes an impromptu consult about a new apartment. Later, a slow ride in the glass elevator yields the city’s postcard: Eiffel Tower, Grand Palais, Notre-Dame the kind of tableau that insists your phone become a camera. Dinner is at Le Petit RH oysters, perhaps, and a citrusy cocktail before a final descent, where mirrors and bronze soffits turn the staircase into an infinite loop. It reads as a narrative arc rather than a shopping trip.
The business calculus
Beyond romance, the Paris gallery is an instrument. RH has reported strong early demand at new European sites and is using these landmark galleries as beachheads for membership growth, design services, and brand equity in markets where American luxury players have traditionally struggled to establish deep cultural ties. Opening during Paris Design Week and overlapping with Maison&Objet isn’t incidental it maximizes visibility among designers, buyers, and media, while seeding local curiosity. The Champs-Élysées brings tourist volume; the rooftop and restaurants bring repeat local use. If the model works, expect RH to extend the format across other European capitals; London and Milan are already signposted in coverage and company communications.
What it signals for Paris
Paris has seen a surge of hybrid venues that blur categories hotels as galleries, maisons as cafés, museums as concept stores. RH Paris joins that conversation with an American accent and a confident sense of spectacle. Its success will be measured not only in sales but in how it is used: as a meeting place for the design community; as a photo vantage; as a quiet library on a rainy afternoon; as a dinner spot with visiting friends. If the Champs-Élysées is a theater of global luxury, RH’s new gallery is an assured new act.
Key details at a glance
Opening to the public: September 5, 2025 (VIP previews September 4).
Address: 23 avenue des Champs-Élysées, 75008 Paris.
Scale: ~3,900 sq m across seven levels.
Design partners & features: Foster + Partners interventions; glass-and-brass rooftop elevator; white-onyx-clad restaurant and bar; Alison Berger lighting; Ateliers Gohard gold-leaf ceiling.
Hospitality concepts: Le Jardin RH, The World of RH Bar & Lounge, Le Petit RH, plus rooftop seating with Eiffel Tower views.
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