Original stone pillars, hand-painted wooden boards and antique-shop finds litter the newly-opened Gucci Garden in Florence’s ancient Palazzo della Mercanzia.
An age-old spirit haunts this splendid boutique, which houses everything quaint, from English country house cabinets to Tuscan side tables - each of which have been hunted, repaired, and repainted. A celebration of the maison’s decadent history, as well as that of the Italian city, the Gucci Garden is the brand’s latest luxurious creative space, which has been carefully designed to complement the grandiose building’s architecture by creative director Alessandro Michele himself.
In 2011, the Gucci Museo opened in the same historic palazzo, which dates back to 1337, and now the Gucci Garden takes this conventional concept of a museum and beautifully reimagines it. The ground floor features a restaurant spearheaded by chef Massimo Bottura, which is called the Gucci Osteria. Internationally-famed for this three Michelin-starred restaurant Osteria Francescana, Massimo shares the floor with a bazaar-like boutique.
Additional floors are dedicated to different aspects of the brand's illustrious past, from famous icons and separates, to appearances in cinema and natural history.
All products feature a distinctive Gucci Garden label, which is exclusive to the store, and includes clothes and one-of-a-kind accessories, as well as pieces from the Gucci Décor collection. “The garden is real,” says Alessandro about the space’s opening, “but it belongs above all to the mind, populated with plants and animals: like the snake, which slips in everywhere, and in a sense, symbolises a perpetual beginning and a perpetual return.”
