Listen Up, New York: A-List Designer Laura Gonzalez Just Opened a Gallery in TriBeCa
With her spot-on personal style, soft Parisian accent, and effortless furnishings, designer Laura Gonzalez exudes an unmistakably French aura. She’s brought that sensibility to unmistakably French projects, too, ranging from the opulent interiors of Lapérouse (an iconic 18th-century Paris restaurant) to a decadent shop for the “Picasso of Pastry” Pierre Hermé on the Champs-Elysées.
The store’s vestibule showcases a glimmering floral chandelier.
This week, devotees to all things Gonzalez are in luck: The designer has just opened a gleaming new gallery in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood that aims to bring the vibe of the City of Light to a Big Apple clientele. The showroom at 102 Franklin Street, Galerie Laura Gonzalez, is about three times as big as the flagship location on Paris’s Rue de Lille (which Gonzalez calls her “European playground”)—and she’s giddy for the impact it can create.
“This is not a gallery, the way people used to see art galleries. It's a way of living,” the ELLE DECOR A-List designer tells us. “We want to show the way the French live and used to live.”
The designer with her Himawari floor lamp.
The space displays highlights from Laura Gonzalez’s collection that represent the pinnacle of French craftsmanship: in materials like ceramics, wood, metal, and glass. There’s her Medusa side table (with hand-cast, twisted bronze legs that evoke the seductive mystery of the famed Greek femme); poufs covered in patterned velvet; feminine chandeliers (the Lilypad Chandelier will never not be a point of conversation); and the Himawari floor lamp-sculpture hybrid, which resembles a whimsical, animated flower straight out of The Lorax.
A table is surrounded by Gonzalez’s Mawu Hana embroidered chairs.
In fact, to step into Galerie Laura Gonzalez is to enter a garden: Delicate blooms seem to be the inspiration for many of her creations, making the showroom all the more buoyant and life-affirming. There are also surprising twists on Gonzalez’s core offerings, like her beloved Rainbow Table (with its funky, multicolored raku top and hand-carved base): now reinterpreted in black to better fit the New York vibe. “We also used a lot of dusty silver, a lot of New York colors, to bring the sexiness of [the city],” she says.
This isn’t the first time the concrete jungle is getting a taste of Gonzalez’s sensuous ethos, however. She was behind the redesign of Cartier’s flagship 5th Avenue location and curated a solo show at The Invisible Collection’s Upper East Side townhouse, among other projects. This certainly won’t be Gonzalez’s last love letter to the city either: She’s in the process of designing the Paris department store Printemps’ first ever U.S. location, set to open on Wall Street next spring.
A bright red lacquered desk and matching chair sits beneath a skylight. “This is not a gallery, the way people used to see art galleries. It’s a way of living,” Gonzalez says.
The Tribeca gallery launch couldn’t have been better timed to a more subtle kind of transformation—or “phase of evolution,” as she calls it—in Gonzalez’s work. With a portfolio that’s grown to encompass projects in Shanghai, Barcelona, Stockholm, and beyond, Gonzalez has entered what she feels is a markedly “Japanese era.”
“We were very, very maximalist, and now, for example, we didn’t put fabrics on the walls [of the new gallery] for the first time,” the designer says. “It's luxurious, it’s detailed, but it's never too much.”