Luxury mirage: a new Louis Vuitton store in Tokyo's Roppongi Hills is a homage to sensuous material and optical effects.

When in 1998 the French luxury goods company Louis Vuitton acquired a commercial lot in Nagoya, Japan, its architecture department was faced with producing a design for its first stand-alone store. Having made their mark with boutiques sectioned off in large department stores or with limestone facades and classy show windows sandwiched between other stores on urban streets, the in-house architects, Eric Carlson and David McNulty, made a pivotal decision that gave the company a surprising new corporate architectural identity, uniquely Japanese, that is now travelling well to New York and other international locales. They selected young Japanese architects to participate in a quick competition to design the exterior facade in Nagoya against the challenge that the tried-and-true plan for the interior would be retained.

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In less than a week, Jun Aoki, a veteran of Arata Isozaki & Associates with his own Tokyo firm, produced the winning solution by considering the nature of boundaries between a structured inside and a messy business district outside, neither of which could be altered. He likened this division where two worlds touch to 'the line between oil and water'. Though it can be seen, he says, 'it has no substance'. By combining this concept with the moire effect often seen at cherry blossom time when Japanese women wear gossamer garments over pale pink kimonos, he recognized how overlapping patterns produced a third that 'can be seen, but isn't there'.

Aoki translated this into architecture by designing a double exterior wall, an outer wall of glass with a milky film of Louis Vuitton's signature damier or checkerboard pattern (created for their time-honoured luggage in 1898) against an inner opaque structural wall of the same pattern in white and dark brown. Viewed by passers-by, the entire facade appears to dematerialize into a moire mist with the store logo and display windows, cantilevered between the walls, floating in an airiness. With illumination provided between the walls from below at night, the cubic volume becomes a mysterious diffusion of pure light, a glowing lantern in the Tokyo streetscape.

Already well known in Japan for his prize-winning museums and houses identified by individual letters, Aoki moved forward quickly to adapt this new concept to other LV locations, including a ground-level corner of the Matsuya department store on Tokyo's fashionable Ginza. Here he altered the design with double glass walls of thinner and clearer French glass to eliminate the green tint of Nagoya. But also, the damier frit in white was slightly altered in size and frequency on both surfaces to give a double moire effect from both near and far away. In his belief that every building speaks its own image, the LV store Aoki next designed on Omotesando, Tokyo's chic Zelkova tree-lined avenue of fashion, resembles a cubist formation of the company's travelling trunks that also dematerializes into a haze through its metal mesh facades.

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In Japan, Louis Vuitton has become something of a cult phenomenon for a multitude of young women shoppers, many seen on the streets slinging not one but two LV bags over their shoulders (and groups camp out overnight for new-store openings). Louis Vuitton has kept pace with its stores--48 in Japan alone--that provide shopping rituals almost as formal as the tea ceremony. Not surprising, in Tokyo's Roppongi district, known for its razzmatazz night life, the company secured the prime location on the gateway plaza to Roppongi Hills, the massive complex of high-rise commercial and residential buildings masterminded by developer Minoru Mori with a multi-level hub of exclusive shopping malls and stylish restaurants. This time, Jun Aoki, working with architects Eric Carlson and Aurelio Clementi, had free rein to design the entire store that opened last year.

Nothing surpasses the drama of Roppongi's porous facade, a monumental pixelized screen of 30 000 parallel glass tubes in honeycomb formation that is both reflective and transparent to the pedestrian with kaleidoscopic views into the interior. Illuminated within by linear grazers below (installed by lighting designers George Sexton Associates), the wall produces a mirage effect of appearing and disappearing with the name 'Louis Vuitton' emerging from its midst like a giant shadow. This store stays open until 11pm, and the entertaining nightclub interiors of fine woods, leather and limestone bring the atmosphere outside into the shopping experience with a bag bar counter with stools, a shoe salon, luggage lounge and a dance floor with fibre-optic videos of seasonal motifs like cherry blossoms, autumn leaves and snowflakes. Highly polished or brushed stainless-steel curtain dividers of interlocking rings keep the theatrical spaces open and airy and provide more reflective light. Though the materials are bold, the atmosphere is redolent of traditional Japanese architecture closed off by screens so that at the opening ceremony a temporary Shinto shrine built inside looked perfectly at home.

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