Christian Louboutin - P 2014
REX USAIt’s been a big few days for Christian Louboutin. First, the king of all things red soled and scrumptious sashayed into the beauty game with a line of $50 nail polishes. And today, Pret-a-Reporter can exclusively report that the foot candy king has signed a lease on a new storefront at the tony yet chill Brentwood Country Mart on L.A.’s Westside.
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Country Mart owner James Rosenfield tells Pret-a-Reporter that he’s spent the past two years trying to fold Louboutin into his merchant mix, which currently includes Kendall Conrad, Jenni Kayne and beauty retailer Space NK. The Country Mart is also where Gwyneth Paltrow‘s Goop opened its first-ever pop-up shop in May.
“Christian Louboutin has been a pioneer of retail areas,” Rosenfield says, noting the shoe designer’s arrival in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District back when it was still known for sirloin, not Soho House. “They didn’t know we existed. Eventually [Christian] came to look and fell in love with the mart.”
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The two-story, 1,700-square-foot space — the former home of well-known boutique Post 26 — marks Louboutin’s second retail store in the Los Angeles area, with his flagship and corporate office on Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood. The brand also has a store at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, roughly 46 miles southeast of L.A. While the boutique will commingle with the Country Mart’s other high-end shops when it opens later this year or at the beginning of 2015, it will also count a shoe repair shop and old-fashioned barber as neighbors.
“I said to Christian, ‘You’re next to a post office!'” says Rosenfield, who has owned the cobblestone courtyard center — a frequent haunt of area residents Naomi Watts, Maria Shriver and Reese Witherspoon — for nearly 12 years. “He said, ‘I love it!’ We are very excited.”
