Out Of The Box

Any Christian Louboutin loyalist knows that the look of the designer’s boutiques is as recognizable as the crimson soles of his shoes. Whether in Los Angeles, Paris or Moscow, the luxurious stores all feature red carpeting, arched cubbyholes for displaying the shoes and touches of clear acrylic and mirror. The ultrachic shops are the work of New Yorkers Eric Clough and Eun Sun Chun, partners in architecture and design firm 212box. Clough, 35, and Chun, 33, first collaborated with Louboutin when they designed his boutique in New York’s West Village, which opened in 2004. Since then, the duo have completed five more locations and are currently putting the final touches on the designer’s latest outpost, in Las Vegas. “Christian wanted to do something fun to go along with the energy of Vegas,” said Clough. “So we built a giant roulette wheel for the store. Everybody who buys something gets a chance to spin it and win a prize.” While the pair’s Louboutin projects keep them quite busy—they have new shops in London, Jakarta, Singapore, and Costa Mesa, California, in the works—212box has taken on plenty of other high-end residential and retail work lately. They designed a modern Upper West Side apartment for novelist Philip Roth and are nearly finished renovating a Lower East Side town house for Tatiana von Furstenberg. This June they’re scheduled to complete a second store for bespoke clothier Seize sur Vingt inside the Plaza Hotel. And their ambitions continue to grow. The partners recently opened a sister office in Chicago called, appropriately, 312box.

Photo: Tony Blasko