Longchamp has officially become a resident of Wukang Road, a hip neighborhood in Shanghai known for its European-style architecture and plane trees.
Nestled at the corner of Wukang Road and Anfu Road, an area that has recently blossomed into a vibrant streetstyle hub, Longchamp‘s “little white building” — a listed historic monument — is a two-story, 490-foot modernist structure designed by local architect Harry Tam in 1948, the same year the brand was founded.
The Longchamp Family Home in Shanghai.
Courtesy
For Jean Cassegrain, chief executive officer of Longchamp and grandson of the company’s founder, the store, dubbed “Longchamp Family Home,” is about discovering the history of the house and the French way of living.
“I think it’s only in Shanghai that we can do a project like this because we have this mixture of Chinese and Western styles that make it very unique, very much integrated,” said Cassegrain in an interview.
“Here we are creating a shopping experience that is different, and also it’s small scale, so it’s not overwhelming — we’ve approached this project with a lot of humility — it’s more complicated to do a project like this than opening one more shop in one more shopping mall — we simply want the customer to feel fully immersed in the brand, the story, and its values,” added Cassegrain.
Longchamp, which launched a pop-up down the road a year ago, has become one of the first Western luxury brands to call Wukang Road home. In the last few years the leafy avenue has become a tourist hot spot with average footfall of 30,000 people, according to local media reports.
Optimal traffic and an embedded sense of discovery — the street has a high density of cultural relics — helped the store become a top-grossing unit for Longchamp in Shanghai since it soft-opened over a week ago.
“With no advertising and competing with some of the big mall locations, so it’s definitely more than we expected,” said Cassegrain.
Exuding a sense of warmth and intimacy with a lived-in setting, the store is organized as a family house with a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a library, a game room, and more.
The ground floor, with herringbone parquet floors and decorative moldings, evokes the elegance of a Haussmann-style Parisian apartment. The guests first enter the living room, which is outfitted with a blue-and-green rug and a blue sofa by Pierre Paulin — and artworks by the French geometric abstraction artist Geneviève Claisse echo the composition created by the furniture. Playful objects and artworks, including vintage Longchamp pieces such as cigarette dispensers, tobacco weights and gaming tracks, tell of the brand’s storied past, one that began as a producer of tobacco pipe coverings.
The living room of the Longchamp store.
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The dining room, a warm and convivial space anchored by a communal table, sits opposite a cabinet filled with cookbooks, ceramics decorated with croissant patterns and more leather goods.
The dining space extends into an indoor winter garden, then an outdoor garden. Conceived by Sophie Delafontaine, Longchamp’s creative director, the back garden includes wrought-iron furniture, hydrangeas, boxwood shrubs, and a traditional frog game enjoyed by the family.
The tranquil garden is also connected to The Café Longchamp, a first for the brand. Here, traditional French dishes and drinks are served in Gien faience ceramics, which is made in a Loire Valley atelier founded 200 years ago.
Upstairs, guests are greeted by a wall lined with framed family portraits that create an intimate history of Longchamp’s legacy. To the left, a playroom with a Billard Nicolas table evoke a sense of shared play, while vintage exhibition posters infuse the room with colorful energy.
Next door is the library, where comic books, playful objects, and traditional French board games are displayed next to a seasonal display of Longchamp’s classic Le Pliage bag. Two paintings, one from Valentin Guillon and another from Fabienne Verdier, each explore a sense of movement and color.
Tucked in the back of the second floor is the dressing room, where Longchamp’s latest ready-to-wear and accessories collections are displayed. Here, a pair of Pierre Paulin Mushroom armchairs in a soft rose hue sit near a print by Etel Adnan, while the window opens up to a residence lane house next door, allowing French living to be in constant dialogue with Shanghainese city life.
The second floor dressing room.
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In a market facing greater disparity, Longchamp has become one of the outperformers, alongside Coach and Ralph Lauren, according to a recent HSBC report. Cassegrain said the momentum resulted from “many years of doing the groundwork, establishing the brand slow and steady, and making it better known — it’s difficult to pinpoint one reason,” he explained.
With 50 stores in mainland China, Longchamp has plans to grow its retail network steadily over the next few years, with three to four new ones opening annually and a focus on Shanghai and the broader Yangtze Delta region.
“We want to keep the brand only in the best location, the quality malls and not be everywhere,” added Cassegrain.
The CEO also emphasized the opportunity with ready-to-wear — a kimono jacket in recycled polyester is already resonating well locally.
“Ready-to-wear is currently only in a limited number of locations due to space constraints, so we are also working on enlarging the stores to show more and more of the full collection,” explained Cassegrain.
In terms of sustainability, the brand has been actively working to eliminate air shipments, transitioning to sea freight instead, a method that takes five times longer than air transport.
“This means more organization, but in terms of carbon impact, the difference is huge,” Cassegrain added.
