Restoration Hardware set to go big in Tampa

Now deeply into construction, Tampas next mega-mansion will rise three stories tall and spread out over a 47,000-square-foot space, roughly half the size of some Publix grocery stores, and likely feature rooftop gardens, fountains, and a dozen bedrooms, bathrooms and living rooms.

Luckily for guests and visitors, the mansion will have an open-door policy and everything inside will be for sale. The couches in the living room, the robes in the bathroom and the wine glasses in the kitchen. Thats because this mega-mansion will be a Restoration Hardware Gallery adjacent to International Plaza mall, one of just four supersites the San Francisco-based home design retailer will open around the nation this year.

While most other retailers are closing stores or shrinking stores to better compete with online rivals, Restoration Hardware is very much going the other direction, building big. Very big. And the retailer thus joins a small pack of companies bucking current trends and going for mega-stores: Bass Pro Shops and Academy Sports among them.

In a kind of video manifesto, RH patriarch and Chairman Gary Friedman told Wall Street investors this month that his new stores are so different that they simply wont fit into the established financial models, and anyone hoping to understand the companys strategy just simply has to visit one of these new mega-sites in San Francisco, Houston or Atlanta.

We created spaces that blurred the lines between residential and retail, indoors and outdoors, physical and digital, Friedman said. We created spaces where guests who visit our new homes are saying I want to live here. Ive been in retail almost 40 years and Ive never heard anyone say they wanted to live in a retail store, until now.

Rumors about Restoration Hardwares plans in Tampa have circulated for some time, particularly ever since the Champps Americana restaurant closed at International Plaza and remained dormant.

The company officially is mum about its current store at Hyde Park Village, but given how top executives speak of smaller, 7,000-square-foot sites, its likely the new International Plaza gallery will replace the current, smaller Hyde Park Village site.

This month, paperwork started to circulate through City of Tampa offices that named Restoration Hardware as the retailer, and company officials confirmed the location to the Tribune.

Restoration Hardware has long zigged when other retailers have zagged. It was one of the first merchants to fully embrace the idea that customers want to buy into a whole lifestyle, a whole aesthetic, a whole social strata, and not just walk in to buy a couch or doorknob.

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Restoration Hardware set to go big in Tampa