Bigger Is Better At Chanel

Chanel is launching its biggest boutique in the world in Tokyo, with a 10-floor high-rise building made of glass, banking that Japan's famous appetite for luxury is as hungry as ever.

The store opening last weekend in the Ginza district is much more than your average boutique, even by opulent standards. It features a concert hall, a restaurant by celebrated French chef Alain Ducasse and 1,300 square metres of shopping space with designer items sold nowhere else in the world.

Designed by American architect Peter Marino, the 56-metre high building has a massive curtain wall of glass that encapsulates a nest-shaped block of aluminium in Chanel handbags' signature tweed pattern. The glass facade will light up Ginza each dusk to dawn with 700,000 embedded light-emitting diodes. In what is billed as a world first, the facade itself doubles as a television screen to broadcast to passers-by.

The boutique comes at a total investment of USD 240 million (EUR 180.4 million), a level of opulence believed is worth it to build what he hoped to be "the heart of luxury in Asia." Chanel generates as much revenue in Japan as in the entire European market. It is joining the ranks of Hermes, Louis Vuitton and Dior in buying a major chunk of real estate in Ginza for Japanese consumers.