Valentino Madison Ave Flagship Wins Gold in BETTER Future New York Design Awards

The BETTER FUTURE New York Design Awards 2024 recognized the Valentino Madison Ave flagship with a gold in the interior design – retail category, celebrating the project for innovative and creative building interiors and extraordinary execution. Read the award profile here and find out more about the project below.

The first Valentino flagship in 10 years, the design of the Madison Ave store creates unique spaces based on a reinterpretation of the building’s structure through different sales experiences.

Madison Avenue represents a key location for Valentino and its new flagship marks an important moment in its global retail strategy. The store expands the fashion house’s updated retail concept, which reinterprets the existing building’s structure to accommodate unique brand spaces. Each floor is centered on a distinctive visual narrative, with special attention given to the iconic Valentino red. The flagship houses the couture experience, exclusive VIP corners, a multidisciplinary art space, and distinct sales floors containing luxury ready-to-wear assortments. Client-centric by design, the store brings together hospitality, personalized customer care, and modern design concepts. The Valentino flagship spans three floors, boasts 23-foot high ceilings and exposed steel columns, and has 12,300 square feet of selling space and 20,000 square feet overall.

Dozens of custom finishes dramatically highlight and differentiate the separate sales areas. Based on chromatic compositions and carefully-curated material palettes while highlighting the signature Valentino red, the flagship is the beacon of Italian style. With soaring fluted columns on the building’s neoclassical limestone facade from 1927 and exposed steel columns that run throughout the space, rationalist architecture coexists with warm, enveloping spaces created by careful material and color choices.

The staircase—made of  red Travertino, white Botticino, and black Nero Marquina marble—was an intensive coordination process. The team digitally mapped and documented the existing structural conditions to ensure perfect alignment of the stair in conjunction with zero tolerance vertical surfaces. The team engaged numerous vendors to gather all field dimensions down to the millimeter, as well as templated all treads and risers, and partnered with the Italian stone manufacturer to ensure the zero tolerance dimensions were correct. In Italy, they fabricated and joined the multi-finish treads and risers to be shipped out in one piece. The field team carefully installed tread by tread on-site without any issues. The team completed the stair by installing the waterfall stone down the side and integrated the glass guardrail. This all had to come through the front door on Madison Ave, which required careful planning for building and pedestrian traffic.