Bernard Arnault is pressing ahead with two major developments on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, tightening his grip on one of the world’s most exclusive retail corridors.
Arnault’s luxury conglomerate, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, is planning a new Tiffany & Co. flagship store on the site of the old Luxe Hotel, which will be demolished, according to city filings reviewed by Bloomberg.
Just a block away, LVMH has submitted plans for a big new Louis Vuitton store and cultural campus designed by architect Frank Gehry – a pivot from the company’s original plan to build a hotel, which was rejected by voters in 2023. The new proposal would be the company’s largest project yet in the tony Los Angeles-area enclave.
LVMH is deepening its bet on Rodeo Drive as it contends with headwinds including higher US tariffs on European goods and what it described in July as softening demand in key markets such as China and Japan. Despite that weakness, Rodeo Drive still draws a steady flow of wealthy visitors from Asia, the Middle East and the Americas, offering a palm-tree-lined stage and selfie backdrop that few other shopping venues can match.
Rodeo Drive is in a league with shopping high streets such as Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and the Miami Design District, said Milton Pedraza, chief executive officer of Luxury Institute, a consulting firm. “There are some places and spaces that are iconic, and they are some of the most pleasant and desirable places to be.”
LVMH declined to comment for this article. Executives have previously named Rodeo Drive on a select list of places where it makes more sense to own than rent.
“You can mention Paris, London, New York and Fifth Avenue and probably Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles and that’s about it,” Jean-Jacques Guiony, LVMH’s chief financial officer at the time, said on a 2023 earnings call.
The Paris-based company already has spent more than $900 million on 12 leased or owned boutiques on Rodeo Drive over the years. That includes a new three-floor Bvlgari boutique opening in October.
Its plans to invest more underscore the strength of high-end luxury in the Los Angeles area even as the regional economy struggles in the aftermath of the deadly wildfires in January, a downturn in Hollywood and US immigration raids backed up by a temporary military deployment.
LVMH bought the Luxe Hotel site for $200 million in 2021. Plans for the Tiffany project, the most recent version of which was filed Aug. 4 with the Beverly Hills planning commission, haven’t been publicly announced.
Designs filed with the city call for a three-story building on Rodeo Drive spanning 30,466 square feet (2,830 square meters), featuring a rooftop indoor-outdoor space for very important clients and a restaurant. The plans by architect Peter Marino are wending their way through the planning department. The plan is occurring as LVMH renovates its Tiffany stores, a process that’s about 30% complete, CFO Cecile Cabanis said in July.
The campus proposed for Louis Vuitton calls for about 100,000 square feet in two buildings connected by pedestrian bridges and an underground tunnel, according to an application with the planning commission. The development, which LVMH disclosed earlier this year, would include luxury retail, a cafe, restaurant, open-air terrace, exhibition space and a garden rooftop. If approved by the city, construction could start in 2026 and finish by 2029.
Pedraza likened the concept to a theme park, with LVMH “becoming more like Disney or Universal Studios than they are just purveyors of luxury goods.”
LVMH originally planned a Cheval Blanc hotel for the same corner of Rodeo Drive and South Santa Monica Boulevard, a proposal rejected by Beverly Hills voters after a contentious fight over zoning and public benefit.
This time, the company’s proposal doesn’t require changes in zoning rules. Darian Bojeaux, an attorney who led opposition to the hotel, said she doesn’t personally like what’s being proposed — but she isn’t campaigning against it either, saying it’s her understanding that the project complies with local codes.
For Beverly Hills City Councilmember John Mirisch, who also opposed the hotel plan, the earlier fight wasn’t over luxury itself but whether the development gave enough back to the community. While he hasn’t taken a position on the Louis Vuitton campus, Mirisch said the project could offer a civic benefit if it draws from LVMH’s art holdings.
“If they use that to feature the amazing LVMH world-class art collection and bring that to Beverly Hills, that would be a tremendous community benefit,” he said.
LVMH’s latest plans cap a buying spree on the street that began more than a decade ago, mirroring its approach in other global hot spots such as New York and Paris, where it paid $1 billion in 2023 for a retail property on the Champs-Elysees.
In 2012, LVMH paid $85 million for a site on Rodeo Drive now being developed into a Dior flagship opening later this year. Between 2018 and 2020, the company spent another $465 million to piece together four parcels for the planned Cheval Blanc hotel.
“There’s these hubs where people go and they have expectations of what stores are there — and if you’re not there, then the money flows to competitors,” said Justin Mateen, a tech and real estate investor who co-founded Tinder.
Mateen and his brother Tyler paid $211 million in 2024 for a building on the corner of Rodeo and Wilshire Boulevard they plan to rebrand as One Rodeo, a new deluxe retail venue.
Prime real estate on Rodeo Drive typically commands annual rents of between $960 and $1,200 a square foot, while store sales often top $10,000 per square foot, said Houman Mahboubi, a broker with CBRE Group Inc.
“That limited supply creates urgency for groups like LVMH to buy rather than lease,” said Mahboubi, who was involved in the sale of the Luxe Hotel site.
Beverly Hills trailed only New York in new luxury openings from July 2023 to July 2024, with Rodeo Drive accounting for more than 40% of all new luxury space in the Los Angeles market, according to a report from Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.
Strong demand illustrates the willingness of high-end brands to splurge on one of the areas that make up the “absolute core” of global glamor, said Jay Luchs, vice chairman at Newmark Group Inc. and a longtime broker on Rodeo Drive. It’s not just about securing space on the street, he said. It’s about appearing on the feeds of influencers who flock to Rodeo Drive.
“People that have hundreds of millions of followers on Instagram — those are very important in fashion and in influence in the world,” he said.
Ami Paris is continuing its flagship opening programme but instead of Europe, this time it has turned its attention to Asia with a debut in Seoul. It has just opened its new multi-level flagship in the heart of Hannam at 45, Itaewon-ro 55ga-gil, Yongsan-gu.
Ami Paris, Seoul
And it said this “signals a meaningful evolution for the brand’s retail experience: spanning over 425 sq m, it stands as Ami Paris’s largest flagship globally, introducing a Parisian wardrobe and gathering place rooted in the timeless principles of Korean Hanok architecture”.
It added that the space “embraces Seoul’s cool contemporary soul, connecting with a culturally rich neighborhood and a style-attentive crowd who value effortless elegance, art, and discovery”.
Intended to be more than a traditional boutique, the venue is conceived as an “urban haven and welcoming residence, representing a respectful adaptation to the local context, with a unique sense of intimacy and togetherness”.
It’s certainly an interesting design. Visitors are guided from the street through an underground passage, emerging into the Ami Garden (“a curated oasis of local flora including rowan and maple trees”) before “ascending to the main entrance. This transitional ritual marks a shift from the city’s pace to a serene, breathing space”.
The design concept is based in traditional Hanoks, “creating a cosy atmosphere through a refined interplay of materials: dark oak, granite, and Maljat stone, accented by Ami Paris’s signature elements of beige limewash, gold, champagne gold and mirror finishes”.
Custom wooden furniture and low-slung seating areas are designed to invite visitors to linger, while bespoke paper lighting, evocative of traditional Hanji, “bathes the interiors in a soft, diffused glow”.
The store also inaugurates an artist residency in collaboration with the Pipe Gallery. Talents “will be invited to engage with the space, ensuring the Ami Paris home remains a dynamic site of cultural conversation”.
At launch, the presentation features the work of Korean-French contemporary artist Chansong Kim.
The unpredictability involved in doing business with the US has come into sharper relief with the threat of new tariffs being applied to UK exports. And international delivery specialist ParcelHero said Britain’s small businesses “will be the first casualties of [President] Trump’s new Greenland tariff war”.
Donald Trump at the White House, Washington, D.C. (United States), 16 January 2026 – AFP
Any new tariffs come after extra duties were already imposed last year while the de minimis exemption was abolished.
In 2024, the UK exported around $828m-worth of textiles such as clothing to the US. Most of these products will have had a value of under $800 and that de minimis abolition will have had a huge impact.
But even those business selling luxury goods that didn’t previously qualify for zero duties under the de minimis rule have been hit hard already.
ParcelHero said that the UK currently has one of the most favourable US tariff rates of 10%, following a trade deal with the country, but “even so, a UK-made coat costing $800 is already likely to cost US shoppers at least an extra $80 (£60) more than it did at the beginning of 2025, assuming that the UK seller passed on all the tariff costs to their US customers. That may not be the only applicable tariff, however, as it could also attract a further tax depending on the item’s tariff code.”
With the new tariff threat just issued, from the beginning of February, “that same coat could cost American consumers around $960 due to the imposition of a further 10% tariff. More concerningly still, from June it could cost them more than $1,000, as February’s 10% tariff rises to 25%. UK specialist and family-run businesses will struggle to survive in the US market as American shoppers turn to cheaper products from elsewhere”.
Parcelhero thinks Trump’s tariff threat over Greenland will particularly impact small UK businesses — which are less able to absorb extra costs and to have the mega-marketing budgets to cement their desirability in consumers’ minds — disproportionately.
The company’s head of consumer research, David Jinks, said he “agrees with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer that the imposition of new tariffs on the UK and seven other countries that oppose Trump’s plans to take control of Greenland is ‘completely wrong’.
“Many smaller UK exporters are already reeling from the impact of the 10% tariff imposed on the majority of UK products last year. On top of that came the axing of the US de minimis tariff exemption that previously enabled British goods valued at $800 (around £600) or under to enter America duty free. Britain’s SME manufacturers and exporters are likely to be the first casualties of Trump’s new tariff war. Many smaller UK companies may have to quit the US market entirely if the Greenland tariffs are imposed.
“The US is Britain’s largest single overseas market and in 2024, before Trump announced his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs in April 2025, around 39,500 UK VAT-registered businesses exported goods to the US. Many of these are SME businesses and marketplace traders that are disproportionately affected by the new tariffs.”
And the company thinks that if the tariffs are applied, it will mean a wider move towards tariffs globally. “Whatever the ongoing impact of new US tariffs, the repeal of its de minimis rules and a potential tit-for-tat trade war over Greenland, we are inevitably looking at a period of continuing volatility and changes to US shipments,” Jinks added.
Matalan is the latest big-name UK retailer to report on the Golden Quarter as well as the narrower festive season and it appears to have done well late last year.
It said that in Q3 (the three months ended 28 November) EBITDA was up 38% year-on-year “reflecting sales growth and market share gains”.
The fashion and homewares retailer said that pre-IFRS16 EBITDA jumped to £27 million during the quarter on the back of like-for-like sales growth of 2%, coupled with its ongoing focus on margin and efficiencies. This builds on the strong momentum delivered in H1 2026, with pre-IFRS16 EBITDA up 53% to £61 million in the financial year to date.
Its digital performance was “very strong” in Q3, with like-for-like sales up 11% and Black Friday delivering its strongest ever online sales day outside of the pandemic. That reflects the firm’s heavy investment in this channel of late and with a new native app due to launch later this year alongside a refreshed loyalty scheme, it’s clearly expecting the outperformance to continue.
But its stores are a key part of its investment programme too and in particular, during Q3, its refreshed stores outperformed the wider estate by 12%. The company didn’t detail how the stores performed overall but did say that it plans to upgrade 40 more locations in its next financial year.
As for the nine weeks up to 2 January, like-for-like sales rose 1%, which is below the 2% recorded for Q3 but coming against a backdrop in which many retailers reported falls, it’s not a bad result.
Categories including women’s outerwear and men’s formalwear and sportswear performed particularly well and the retailer said it gained market share across both women’s and men’s in the period, “reflecting the renewed product offer and significant improvements in brand perception”.
Overall, it “outperformed the wider market in October through to December, delivering year-on-year sales growth ahead of peers”.
Executive chair Karl-Heinz Holland said: “Our business transformation continues to deliver tangible results, with another strong quarter of EBITDA performance, alongside a return to sales growth. This reflects our relentless focus on delivering better quality, style and value, underpinned by sustained investment in product, stores and digital. This has enabled us to outperform the market, despite a challenging trading backdrop. Looking ahead, we look forward to welcoming our new CEO next month and remain confident in the business delivering sustainable profitable growth.”
Politics8 years ago