Hermès Lands on Bond Street

Seventeen years in the making, the house has opened its largest maison in Europe on London’s most storied shopping street.

London has been waiting for this one since 2009. That was the year Hermès quietly bought the freehold of 166 New Bond Street, the address British jeweller Asprey had called home since 1847. Then the house did something rare in luxury retail. It waited. Seventeen years and a six-year refurbishment later, the doors finally opened on 16 June 2026, and the result is the largest Hermès store in Europe and only the sixth Hermès maison in the world. This is not a refurbishment of the old store or an expansion of it. The former London flagship at 155 New Bond Street, home to the house for half a century, has closed, as has the Hermès concession inside Selfridges. What replaces them is something on a completely different scale.

Six houses, one world

The maison is stitched together from six Grade II listed Georgian townhouses, most dating to the early 1720s, now interlinked into a single labyrinth of 55 rooms across five floors. Moving through it is a deliberate act of discovery, connected by four staircases and three lifts. The most dramatic of them is a spiral staircase that sits beneath a steel and glass skylight originally created by Foster and Partners, a feature carried over from the building’s Asprey era and folded into the new design.

The interiors come from Paris studio RDAI, led by artistic director Denis Montel, a longtime Hermès collaborator who began work on the project in 2021. The brief was unusual: to find a distinctly British expression of the Hermès universe. Pierre-Alexis Dumas has described the house as the most British of French houses, and that sensibility runs through every room, from restored period detailing to colour used as a structuring device, with each métier given its own palette.

Craft as the language

More than 50 artisans contributed to the space, working in everything from handcrafted furnishings and marquetry to specialist glasswork and decorative wall treatments. The maison holds 500 artworks, each chosen for this address by Dumas, a mix of oil paintings, technical sketches and silk scarves hung like tapestries. A striking horse sculpture by British artist Jessica Wetherly stands among the displays, and the beauty room is wrapped in hand-painted wallpaper by London illustrator Katie Scott.

Every Hermès métier is present, which the previous London home could never fully accommodate. Leather goods, silk, ready-to-wear, homeware, watches and fine jewellery each have proper room to breathe, jewellery and watches now occupying an entire floor rather than a single corner. There are two rooftop terraces, planted with real flowers, and a café for pausing between rooms.

Built for the next generation

The thinking behind 166 is long. Hermès has framed the opening not as a response to the current market but as a statement of permanence, a building shaped for the clients of the decades ahead rather than the season. Sixth generation building for the seventh, as the family tells it.

In a city wrestling with its own commercial pressures, an opening of this ambition reads as an act of confidence. Bond Street, a thoroughfare spoken of in the same breath as Avenue Montaigne and Fifth Avenue, has its most considered new resident in years.