Luxury Retailers Are Buying Out Their Landlords

Luxury retailers, flush with cash, are spending big on real estate in the world’s most expensive and exclusive shopping corridors.

In New York City, Prada recently agreed to buy the building that houses its Fifth Avenue store as well as the building next door for more than $800 million. Gucci’s parent company, Kering, is also paying nearly $1 billion for a 115,000-square-foot retail space a few blocks south.

Luxury behemoth LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton , meanwhile, is in discussions to purchase the Fifth Avenue retail space occupied by Bergdorf Goodman’s men’s store, according to a person familiar with the matter.

This activity follows a flurry of purchases in Europe, where high-end retailers have snapped up real estate on high streets including Avenue Montaigne in Paris and London’s New Bond Street in recent years.

Luxury’s real-estate shopping spree shows that retailers are using their considerable cash to free themselves from the control of landlords and plant their flags on streets where they want a long-term presence.

“The rents that the luxury retailers were paying on Fifth and in other prime locations were simply astronomical,” said Eric Menkes , co-chair of leasing for the New York-based law firm Adler & Stachenfeld. “There comes a point in time when these retailers looked in the mirror and said, ‘Why am I making my landlord rich?’”

Retail rents on upper Fifth Avenue haven’t surpassed pre pandemic levels, but they averaged $2,000 a square foot over the past year, making the corridor the most expensive retail destination in the world, according to real-estate firm Cushman & Wakefield.

High-end retailers renewing their leases are often subject to the biggest rent increases, because they don’t want to leave well-known, successful addresses and pay for expensive build-outs at new stores.

“You don’t want to give up that location,” Menkes said. “And your landlord knows that.”

While the most recent eye-catching deals have been signed in New York and Europe, luxury companies are also buying buildings elsewhere. The French fashion house Chanel paid $63 million for a building on Post Street in San Francisco in 2021, the same year LVMH bought a hotel in Beverly Hills.

Chanel selectively acquires real estate “to protect its long-term presence in key cities around the world, and secure prime locations for luxury retail,” a spokesperson said.

While real-estate purchases so far appear concentrated in the most exclusive shopping corridors, luxury retailers are also signing leases in new markets and for bigger footprints to accommodate their swelling collections as well as new offerings such as restaurants and bars.

A surge in shopping for luxury goods powered the world’s largest luxury retailers to record profits in recent years. Sales growth has since slowed, but LVMH, which owns 75 brands including Dior and Hennessy, still reported nearly $94 billion in sales in 2023, beating analysts’ forecasts and sending the company’s stock price soaring in European trading .

“The premium luxury groups have so much cash on their balance sheet,” said Eric Le Goff , vice chairman and head of luxury for the brokerage Retail by Mona. For companies not contemplating acquisitions, “why not deploy the cash into real estate where you know you’re going to be there, hopefully for the next 100 years?”

In addition to cash, well-performing retailers have the option of floating corporate bonds to pay for their real-estate purchases at a lower rate than the traditional real-estate investor could get for a bank mortgage, according to Will Silverman , a managing director at Eastdil Secured, a real-estate investment-banking firm.

“The spread between where they can borrow and where a traditional real-estate investor can borrow, might be several percentage points apart,” Silverman said. That spread has never been wider in memory, he added.

This dynamic could mean luxury retailers are competing mainly against each other for real estate at the most desirable locations.

Luxury companies tend to cluster, so once one deal is signed, “usually that causes others to all jump in and want to be in the market, which then causes demand to increase and prices to rise,” said Andrew Goldberg , vice chairman at real-estate brokerage CBRE.

For Jack Freeman, a compelling interior should not look as though it was completed in a single shopping trip.

The founder and designer behind FREEMAN & CO prefers rooms that develop through art, travel, commissioned furniture and objects collected over time. It is an approach that treats the home less as a decorative project and more as an evolving portrait of its owner.

“I am a true believer in collecting versus decorating,” Freeman says.

That distinction underpins the international practice he has built across private residences, hotels, property developments, yachts and private aviation. Its projects stretch from Point Piper, Vaucluse, Circular Quay and Toorak to Mayfair, Bel Air and the Caribbean.

Although the locations and architecture vary considerably, the work is connected by a restrained design language. Natural stone, warm timbers and sculptural furniture establish the foundation, while art, bespoke lighting and individual objects give each interior its identity.

The objective is not to overwhelm a room with obvious symbols of expense. It is to create an environment that feels calm, layered and particular to the people living within it.

“The greatest luxury isn’t about excess,” Freeman says. “It’s about creating an oasis where you come home and feel immediately grounded — effortlessly chic and deeply personal.”

Collecting instead of decorating

Decorating can imply the completion of a room: selecting the required furniture, filling the available walls and producing a coherent finished image.

Collecting is less conclusive.

A collected interior has room to change as its owners travel, discover artists, inherit pieces or reassess how they use their home. Its character comes from the relationship between objects rather than adherence to a single brand or season.

That does not mean placing unrelated pieces together without discipline. The designer must understand scale, proportion, material and provenance well enough to create a dialogue between them.

A contemporary artwork might sit beside a historic piece of furniture. A precisely detailed new interior may be interrupted by an irregular object made by hand. Smooth stone can be balanced by timber, textiles or a patinated metal surface that becomes richer with age.

The tension between those elements is part of the appeal.

For Freeman, art is not an accessory to be added once the furniture plan is complete. It forms part of the architecture and atmosphere of the room from the beginning.

Lighting is considered in the same way. Beyond its practical purpose, a bespoke fitting can operate as a suspended sculpture, changing both the room’s composition and the way its materials are experienced after dark.

A design perspective shaped by travel

International travel plays a significant role in Freeman’s creative process.

Design fairs such as PAD Paris and Salone del Mobile in Milan provide opportunities to encounter emerging designers, established galleries, new materials and collectible furniture away from the filter of social media.

More spontaneous discoveries can prove equally important.

“Sometimes it’s the simple things,” Freeman says. “That piece found on a shopping trip with a client in Paris, stumbling across an artisan’s workshop, or a special memory that forms the narrative of the story.”

Objects selected during travel bring more than visual interest into a home. They carry an association with a place, maker or experience, giving the client a connection that cannot be reproduced by ordering an entire interior from a catalogue.

Freeman’s influences are international, but his projects are not conceived as replicas of Parisian, Milanese or Californian style. Each commission responds to its architecture, setting, natural light and the daily lives of its occupants.

A waterfront Sydney residence demands a different treatment from a Mayfair townhouse. A Caribbean estate shaped by brutalist architecture and reflecting pools calls for another response again.

The designer’s role is to absorb those references without allowing them to overwhelm the individual qualities of the property.

Designing the complete experience

FREEMAN & CO extends beyond conventional interior decoration.

The practice’s stated services include interior design and architecture, project management, property acquisition, development advice, concept design, documentation, furniture and lighting design, procurement and art curation.

That breadth allows the team to become involved before a room’s dimensions and finishes are fixed.

Early participation can be important at the top end of the residential market, where architecture, landscape, interiors, technology and art must operate as one environment. Decisions about ceiling heights, wall dimensions, sightlines and lighting can directly affect where art is installed or how custom furniture is proportioned.

The practice can then carry those decisions through to procurement and final installation, maintaining the design narrative as a project moves between architects, builders, specialist craftspeople, dealers and suppliers.

Its residential portfolio includes a South Coast retreat conceived as an escape from urban life, a Caribbean estate with reflecting pools, an East Coast-inspired Palm Beach residence and a Mayfair townhouse organised around an expressive drawing room.

The studio also says it has worked on highly tailored Sydney residences with values exceeding $100 million, although the private nature of such commissions means individual addresses and clients are not always disclosed.

A home that can keep changing

The risk in creating a perfectly resolved interior is that it can become too static — a composition that looks exceptional in photographs but leaves little room for life.

Freeman sees the home as something that should evolve with its owners.

“I love the evolution of design,” he says. “We are talking about people’s lives, and as they evolve, so too should their private sanctuaries.”

That evolution might involve adding art, reupholstering a significant piece, adapting rooms as a family changes or making space for objects gathered through future travels.

The original design needs to be strong enough to accommodate those layers.

This may be the clearest expression of Freeman’s approach to luxury. It is not simply access to rare stone, collectible furniture or commissioned craftsmanship. It is the creation of a personal environment whose meaning deepens rather than diminishes with time.

Fact box

Designer: Jack Freeman

Role: Founder and managing director

Practice: FREEMAN & CO

Base: Australia, with international projects

Project locations named by the practice: Point Piper, Vaucluse, Circular Quay, Toorak, Palm Beach, the NSW South Coast, Mayfair, Bel Air and the Caribbean

Sectors: Private residences, hotels, residential developments, private aviation and superyachts

Services: Interior design and architecture, property development, project management, property acquisition, documentation, furniture and lighting design, FF&E procurement, interior dressing and art curation

Design philosophy: Collected, personal interiors shaped by art, craftsmanship, travel and enduring materials

Website: free-man.co

Luxury Retailers Are Buying Out Their Landlords

Jack Freeman believes the most compelling interiors are not decorated, but collected. The FREEMAN & CO founder creates layered, personal spaces shaped by art, travel and craftsmanship.