Birkin and Kelly bags may soon have a new home on one of Beverly Hills‘s most famous streets.
After months of mystery, it turns out Hermès was the buyer of two adjoining properties on Rodeo Drive. The $400 million spread is the most expensive retail real-estate deal recorded in Beverly Hills in decades; the purchase of the parcel, and that sky-high price tag, was announced last summer, though the buyer wasn’t revealed at the time, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Currently, the storefronts, located at 388 North Rodeo Drive, are home to Tom Ford, Moncler, and Balenciaga. As for whether Hermès will move into the space, that remains to be seen; it’s currently unknown what the French maison plans to do with its new 25,000-square-foot address. The current trio of brands still have a few years left on their leases, so Hermès will have a while to go before it can trot over from its current retail space in the area, located just a three-minute walk up the road.
Hermès is one of just many luxury houses that, with the goal of controlling their own storefronts, has gone on a bit of a property tear to add massive storefronts in prime locales to their portfolios. Gucci and Cartier have each splashed down millions to purchase stores on New York’s Fifth Ave., London’s New Bond Street, and Paris’s Avenue Montaigne, according to WSJ. LVMH, too, is now the owner of many a store on Rodeo Drive, as well as other locales around the globe.
Even though there’s been a luxury slump for the past few years (which Hermès has been avoiding, for the most part), brands are still able to spend large amounts on these real-estate transactions thanks to a high influx of cash. So, though the $400 million sale is the highest acquisition in the area since at least the 2000s, according to data from real-estate company CBRE, it may only be a matter of time until another high-end brands eclipses Hermès’s purchase.
“What you see now on Rodeo Drive is not only a commitment by the luxury brands that are able to buy their real estate, but you’re seeing the buildings get much bigger,” Jay Luchs, a vice chairman at Newmark who worked on the Hermès deal, told WSJ.
The French house will likely find out if bigger is better in Beverly Hills soon enough.
Authors
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Nicole Hoey
Digital Editor
Nicole Hoey is Robb Report’s digital editor. While studying at Boston University, she read, wrote and read some more as an English and journalism major. A class taught by a Boston Globe copy editor…


