Dover Street Market has moved to Haymarket
After 12 years in Mayfair, Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo’s ground-breaking six-storey Dover Street Market is no more, as the team have upped sticks and relocated down the road to Haymarket.
The beautiful new store, which opened on Saturday, is roughly three times as big as the old one – that means three times as many absurdly amazing clothes from the likes of Valentino, Givenchy and Rei Kawakubo protégé Junya Watanabe. The new space continues to house all 14 Commes labels, in addition to relative newcomers Molly Goddard and Simone Rocha, which we can but dream of owning. It’s not all impossibly unaffordable though, there will be some piggy-bank-smashing-worthy collaborations like DSM x Vans and DSM x Timberland.
This move comes after a 200 percent increase in the rent cost at the mayfair location. In late 2014, Dover Street Market, the brainchild of Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo and
her partner and company president Adrian Joffe, signed a 20-year-lease for the new Haymarket space with Amsprop, the property company owned by Lord Alan Sugar, paying about £2.65 million a year in rent, according to reports. The anticipation around Dover Street Market’s opening, and its impact on the cache of the area, was so pronounced that Amsprop, which bought 18-22 Haymarket for £31 million from a Russian investor in 2013, promptly flipped the building, selling it for £65 million to a Qatari investor in July 2015, nearly a year before the store was set to actually open.
As soon as Dover Street Market became a tenant the Alan Sugar sold the store alomost as a plan to earn from his investment. This is definatly a economic factor for Dover Street Market, the steep increase of rent in the old location meant it was no longer suitable to be located in the location.
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'A 200 percent increase in the rent cost at the mayfair location.'