LONDON – From Piccadilly Circus the long, straight boulevard of Piccadilly leads to some of the most distinguished names in British retailing such as Hatchard’s booksellers of 1787 and venerable victualler Fortnum & Mason, on the same site since 1840.
Ancient arcades to either side contain tiny premises selling handmade hats, shoes and gentlemen’s waistcoats with an alarming lack of marked prices.
A slightly blank building to one side of Christopher Wren’s St. James’s Church has windows too high up to see through, but displays on a simple sandwich board at its entrance the enticement “Books, Gifts and Café,” which those who push through the heavy wooden doors soon discover to be rather coy.
Maison Assouline discreetly offers rather more than the equivalent of a Starbucks in a big-box bookstore. It’s out to elevate your experience of life with an injection of culture.
In the high-ceilinged former banking hall, built by the doyen of 20th-century British architects, Edwin Lutyens, long lines of shelves crammed with substantial art books look down on a comfortable sitting room scattered with objets d’art which is a café in the day and a cocktail bar at night.
“We have plenty of people who come here because of the bar. For them this is a beautiful cocktail bar that has a lot of books around it,” says manager Martyna Dargiewicz.
“Then we also have customers who are big fans of Assouline as a publishing house and who collect the coffee-table books. They come here for the books and the bar is a secondary experience once they’ve seen the new things we have to offer.”
The Piccadilly premises are in fact the flagship outlet of Assouline publishing, which also has shops in New York, Paris, Venice, Geneva, Rome, Seoul, Lima, Santiago and Mexico City. In addition to books, they sell stationary, prints and other items to back the Assoulines’ claim that culture is the finest accessory of a luxury lifestyle. London’s is the only shop with a café and bar, though.
In 1994 ,Prosper and Martine Assouline published their first book, a glossy tome celebrating their favourite hotel, La Colombe d’Or near Nice, a watering hole in the 1970s for a generation of cultural icons from David Niven to Picasso and from Jean-Paul Sartre to Roger Moore.
The book was well-received and the couple continued producing books they could not find elsewhere, pleasing as physical objects and both elevating and comforting. In a little over 20 years their list has grown to range from small books on Dadaism to a vast and waterproof volume on the British Antarctic Expedition weighty enough to make any coffee table groan; yours for merely US$4,500.
The linking theme is style expressed in travel, art, food and fashion. The Assoulines will also design and stock a personal library or can have your treasured books rebound.
But while you consider all this there’s the choice of exotic afternoon tea sets or a mean Charlie Chaplin or two, and the pleasure at having found somewhere rather different, hidden in the middle of London.
If you go:
For more information on Maison Assouline visit assouline.com.
For information on London go to the Visit London website at visitlondon.com.
– More stories at culturelocker.com
