One Monte-Carlo Retail Promenade - Monaco
Addicted To Retail (ATR) presents: One Monte-Carlo, the retail promenade that now links the Hôtel de Paris to the Casino de Monte-Carlo in Monaco.
Casino districts have always been retail districts. Garnier's 1879 casino was built with a row of shops facing the square, and when the Société des Bains de Mer decided to rebuild the block between the Hôtel de Paris and the casino, it did not build a mall. Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners designed One Monte-Carlo as a cluster of seven buildings around a pedestrian promenade, a street rather than a corridor, with the casino's dome closing the view at one end and the Mediterranean at the other.
The retail brief was unusually disciplined. Single-brand flagships only, every façade individually designed, no shared shopfront system and no signage above the ground-floor fascia. The result reads like a very good European high street compressed into two hundred metres: Louis Vuitton, Dior, Chanel, Prada, Fendi, Céline and Akris, each with a full-height glazed façade and an interior that the brand's own architects fitted out. The street is paved in the same pale stone as the casino terrace, so the promenade, the square and the casino steps read as one surface.
What works
Scale, mostly. The upper floors are residential, and the shops are kept to two storeys, which keeps the street in proportion with the Belle Époque neighbours. Planting is generous, lighting is warm and low, and the whole thing is pedestrian: the cars that used to circle the square are now underneath it. At night the casino becomes the anchor tenant in the truest sense, the brightest building on the street and the reason the street exists. A visitor walking from the hotel to the gaming rooms passes every flagship twice, which is exactly the point.
What to steal
- Let the anchor be the destination, not the store. In Monaco the casino draws the foot traffic and the boutiques intercept it, the inverse of a department-store mall.
- Design the street, then the shops. One paving material, one lighting temperature, one planting palette. Brand identity lives inside the glass line.
- Short runs. Seven flagships, two hundred metres, a view at both ends. Nobody gets tired.
One Monte-Carlo, Place du Casino, Monaco. Architecture: Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. Developer: Monte-Carlo Société des Bains de Mer.
Tags: Monte Carlo, casino retail, luxury, Rogers Stirk Harbour, promenade