First robin’s-egg-blue nest on the left: the future home of Pierre Deux.
The Red Bank-area home furnishings market is about to get a touch of provincial France and landlord Larry Garmany is about to make a sweetheart match for his primo tenant, Tiffany & Co.
redbankgreen has learned that Pierre Deux, a rapidly growing 19-store chain, has taken one of the two vacant spaces flanking Tiffany at its six-month-old Broad Street address.
A new Pierre Deux store will be up and running by early September, a company official confirms.
While the news is unlikely to be cheered by those who lament, or even vilify, downtown Red Bank’s continuing climb up the socioeconomic ladder, it stands out as only the latest in a series of gravity-defying feats pulled off by Garmany, a Cuban immigrant who bootstrapped a small haberdashery into an upscale men’s and women’s clothier occupying the district’s largest retail space.
A year ago, amid signs of an economic slowdown, Garmany landed Tiffany to take over most of the former post office on Broad Street that had housed his store, called Garmany, before it moved into even nicer digs in the former Steinbach department store building.
With Tiffany’s opening in November, Garmany had all but fulfilled his dream of dazzling, side-by-side emporiums feeding off one another’s upmarket clientele.
Now, amid deep concerns about a sputtering national economy and rapid turnover of retailers in Red Bank, Garmany has not only added a player to the richest end of the table; he’s landed a tenant willing to pay him New York prices, said to be in the high $70-per-square foot range, double the downtown average.
Ask him how he does it, and he’ll tell you it’s by being choosy and patient. There’s still another space to fill in the Tiffany building, he notes, and while he’s had plenty of offers, he’s holding out until he finds what he thinks is the best complement not only to his business and Tiffany’s, but to the town overall.
“It has to be the right one a good fit for Red Bank,” he says.
The bookend spaces are about 1,400 square feet each.
Founded as an antiques shop in Greenwich Village in 1967 by a French guy named Pierre and an American named Peter (thus, the ‘two Pierres’), Pierre Deux sells French country style furniture, textiles, kitchen accessories, cookbooks le works.
Led by Hedwige Cointreau de Bouteville and her husband, Le Cordon Bleu president (and Remy Martin dynasty member) André Cointreau, the privately held company has stores in Millburn, Ridgewood and Secaucus, and is opening new ones at the rate of five a year, says vice president of marketing Heather Ryan.
Pierre D’s been angling for a presence in Red Bank for a while, we’re told. It considered taking space at 25 Broad Street a few years back. But when it balked, Bill Keimig then Pierre Deux’s chief operating officer left the company and opened Chelsea Home, which now has a long-term lease at that address.
Pierre Deux is in the process of staffing up the Red Bank store, Ryan says. Info is available on the company’s website.
