Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen open the Row’s first flagship store in LA this week. The flagship is a 3,800 square foot store located at 8440 Melrose Place, former Sally Hershberger and John Frieda hair salon, where the designers attended since they were kids. The store appears to be one of those hidden gem stores. If you don’t know about it, it would be rare luck that you would stumble upon it while walking through the neighborhood. This is partly because none of the actual store is visible from the street. Besides a white sign serving as an advertisement on the sidewalk, shoppers must first walk through double doors in the outer building, then through a courtyard, where you will find the swimming pool and then, the store’s glass doors. Will you see the twins swimming during the work day? It’s possible. They have placed beach towels nearby the pool, just in case anyone decides the California heat is too much to bear. According to the LA Times, the interior of the store is set up like a home. The designers were aided in interior design by Courtney Applebaum and David Montalba, the LA planner for Isabel Marant. The pool in the courtyard serves as a divider for the store- one side of the pool serves as the east gallery, and the other, the west gallery. The space in the front of the building is referred to as the library.
Mary-Kate and Ashley have always been smart about how they executed plans for the Row. They had a set path in mind for the brand and how they wished to achieve it while transitioning from child stars to luxury designers. As they told WWD, the choice for the first location for the Row was “a toss up between LA and New York.” Ashley tells Women’s Wear Daily, “We take on what the company can handle, when it can handle it.”
Hopefully if this store does well, we can expect another location in New York in the near future. The Olsen’s opened their doors of the Row quietly. They have stated that they won’t have a party or anything, because it is important to them to ensure that they are set up properly, merchandised properly, and that everything is in working order before they start to celebrate.
