Guilia Molteni on LA Flagship
As Molteni&C re-envisions its Los Angeles flagship store, third-generation family member Giulia Molteni reflects on the company’s next chapter in the North American design market.
Sitting in Molteni&C’s Madison Avenue showroom in New York, third-generation family member and chief marketing officer Giulia Molteni speaks about the brand’s growing North American presence with a quiet certainty. For a company that now counts about 130 mono-brand flagship stores across five continents, the renovation and relaunch of its Los Angeles flagship is less an expansion and more a considered next chapter in a long-standing dialogue with design-minded clients in the United States.
Los Angeles is not new territory for Molteni&C. The brand first opened on Robertson Boulevard in 2019 in partnership with a local dealer, embedding itself in a design street that Giulia describes as “the best area,” precisely because it gathers multiple brands in one place. Now, the company is taking direct ownership of the space and undertaking a significant renovation. Conceived with long-time artistic director Vincent Van Duysen, the new showroom is imagined less as a conventional retail environment and more as what Giulia calls an “art collector’s house”, where architecture, design and art coexist in a sequence of intimate, tactile rooms rather than staged vignettes.
Light tones, travertine and pale timber, along with soft, heavily textured fabrics and the new Arial wall panelling system, are used to create a calm, material presence that sits comfortably within the West Coast light. The space will evolve again in March with the introduction of Molteni&C’s latest alfresco collection – a natural fit for a city defined by indoor-outdoor living. For Giulia, this sensitivity to place is crucial; each flagship adheres to a shared DNA yet is subtly tuned to its locality, so that visiting Milan, New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, Melbourne or Doha offer distinct but related experiences.
The LA flagship is also a response to the way people want to live and build now. Giulia notes that the company has shifted from selling individual pieces to designing entire homes “starting from zero”, offering a turnkey service that guides clients from the first idea through to delivery and installation. Behind the scenes, an extensive library of finishes and fabrics allows architects and interior designers to customise each element, placing Molteni&C somewhere “in between a real industry and an artisan company”. In a region where rebuilding efforts continue after the Malibu fires, she sees a role for Italian design “to give our contribution to the rebuilding process” and to support a community long recognised for its architecture and mid-century heritage.
Just as important as the physical renovation is a strategic shift toward owning more key showrooms directly, from Sydney and Melbourne to Los Angeles. For Giulia, removing layers between brand and client allows the company to hear feedback more clearly and channel it straight back into research and development. “The quality of the service must be in line with the quality of the product,” she reflects, noting that the people representing the brand worldwide, many of them architects, are trained at the company headquarters in Giussano to embody this philosophy.
The LA flagship is envisioned as a destination for the wider West Coast design community, from San Diego to Malibu and beyond, animated by intimate events.
Looking ahead, the LA flagship is envisioned as a destination for the wider West Coast design community, from San Diego to Malibu and beyond, animated by intimate events, lectures with leading architects and potential collaborations with museums and cultural institutions. Travelling exhibitions – such as Molteni&C’s Gio Ponti programs and the new collection of “impossible objects” – will further embed the showroom into the cultural life of the city. In a world that can feel increasingly uncertain, Giulia sees the opening as a simple, optimistic gesture: another carefully considered space where people can encounter, and ultimately live with, beautiful design.
