Fashion Wire Daily Paris May 16, 2003 - After a powerful fall collection presented in March garnered ecstatic reviews, Paris-based Australian designer Martin Grant is on a roll. So why is he closing his beautiful little store in an old hairdresser's space on Rue des Rosiers in the Marais, only to open another one a few blocks away in the back of a courtyard, shut away from the street?
"I've had the other shop for eight years," he explained, "and deciding it was time for a change, I wanted to find something else in the area." The new store, which also opens into an office, is described by the designer as a, "workspace/boutique/showroom/office environment." It's of the same spirit as the fourth floor studio-cum-showroom he had in his native Sydney early in his career.
"I wanted this place to be a more intimate environment with more of a salon feel, like an apartment," he says of the new premises, handily located in the same building as his actual design studio. "It's our windows on the world -- hidden in a courtyard!" he laughs.
The 70-square-meter combined commercial space -- with globular lights from the late '50s by George Nelson suspended from the white ceiling and a lightly varnished wooden floor -- houses the current summer collection in the front section which also features a video projection on the wall of Grant's clothing. At the rear of the luminous store, pieces from the fall collection are displayed where customers can try on and order from the looks.
When FWD was visiting the store, one of Grant's best customers called by, a ravishingly beautiful Spanish woman named Brenda Altmeyer. It was her first visit to the new space and she gushed over everything. Apart from becoming a close friend she also labels him as, "my favorite designer. I buy a lot, quite a lot. I don't fare too badly!" Trying on pieces from the fall collection, the sample-sized Altmeyer proclaimed, "I love everything he does -- all of it!" It's this devotion that has won him such ardent fans as Lee Radziwill, Cate Blanchett and Meg Ryan.
Grant not only sells in his own store, but in the UK, Japan, Australia, and in the U.S. in Barneys, Neiman Marcus, Fred Segal and Takashimaya. The secluded Paris store is sort of a mini-flagship, a symbolic site, though Grant is quick to add that, "it's as much a selling space as a workspace."
Visitors to the store can easily spend a relaxing hour shopping here. But not Mutley, Grant's ever-present fashionable canine. The second FWD produced a camera, the curly-haired dog went into an autopilot pose. "He's such a camera whore," Grant exclaimed.
Martin Grant, 44 Rue Vielle-du-Temple, 75004 Paris.
