Hermès was founded way back in 1837. Starting out as a workshop for horse harnesses, it opened a maison (house) in Japan in 2001 that drew on Hermès's more than 160 years of tradition and history. Jean-Louis Dumas, its former CEO, who was Hermès CEO at the time, wanted a location particularly in the Ginza district, where the streets are lined with many long-standing stores. In his mind, he pictured Ginza Maison Hermès as a lantern that would warmly light up the town. Dumas also had a unique idea for the store itself, which he characterized as “an upside-down tree”. The top floor would to contain an art gallery and a little theater—cultural facilities of the sort that are common on the streets of Paris—and function as the “roots”. He intended for these facilities to capture both culture and history, as well as new creative trends and contemporary sensibilities—and pass them down as nourishment not only to visitors but also to Hermès staff working in the building’s atelier and offices, or the “trunk”. The tree would then bear “fruit” in the form of the distinctive Hermès objets (products) available at the boutique on the lower floors. This was the essence of the “upside-down tree”.

It was the architect Renzo Piano who produced a design that transformed this novel idea into a sparkling gem of a building. The interior decoration was handled by Dumas’s wife Rena, who was an interior designer. The use of translucent glass blocks served to both integrate the streetscape and the interior in the daytime and illuminate the streetscape at night as the building transformed into an urban “lantern” lit from inside. If you look up at the Ginza sky from the other side of the street on which Ginza Maison Hermès sits, you will see a statue of an artificier (firework maker). sitting astride a horse on top of the building’s glass facade.