Harrods: A palace built on prestige
Famed London department store launches furniture line with typical style, panache
By David Perry -- Furniture Today, December 3, 2001
LONDON — Harrods rolled out the green carpet here to showcase its fancy new furniture line, which joins a long list of prestigious products showcased by the storied department store.
The retailer, whose trademark green-and-gold logo is a symbol of luxury goods around the world, introduced this fall a collection of wood and upholstered furniture straight out of its own extensive archives.
The debut of the Harrods Fine Furniture Collection, produced and marketed by Highland House, a division of Thomasville Furniture, marked yet another successful product launch for one of the world's best-known stores. Harrods is one of the top tourist attractions in London and is immensely popular with the locals too, drawing as many as 300,000 customers a day.
The store made an extravagant statement about the importance of its furniture collection by showcasing it in several of its Brompton Road windows, viewed by millions of passers-by each week. The retailer even took the unusual step of placing live models in some of the furniture displays to heighten interest in the line.
Inside, the retailer showed off the new furniture line in an elaborately decorated showroom constructed just for that purpose. An A-list of furniture dignitaries was on hand to nod approvingly at the beautifully accessorized furniture presentation.
The Harrods delegation was led by its chairman, Mohamed Al Fayed, who brought the legacy of his native Egypt to the store a few years ago with an intricately crafted Egyptian wing that takes shoppers on a journey back to ancient Egypt. The pharaoh-like figures that look down at the escalators bear a striking resemblance to Al Fayed himself.
The Egyptian escalators were created by Bill Mitchell, Al Fayed's artistic advisor, who also was a key figure in the creation of the Harrods Fine Furniture Collection. Mitchell worked closely with Highland House's general manager, Tom Staats, to bring designs from the Harrods archives to life in the furniture collection.
So it is appropriate that Mitchell's own face appears on a fireplace molding in the Harrods Fine Furniture Collection showroom. The face on the other side of the fireplace is that of Al Fayed, whose presence literally looms large throughout this Cathedral of Consumerism, also known as the Palace in Knightsbridge.
"From the first moment I stepped over the threshold," Al Fayed said, "I knew that this was the most exciting place in the world. The green-and-gold doormat proclaimed the legend 'Enter a Different World.' It is one of the few advertising slogans that does not overstate its case."
The 72 display windows that ring the Harrods palace hint of the vast assortment of merchandise that fills the million square feet of selling space. There are 330 departments on the seven selling floors. Entire floors are devoted to furniture, ladies fashions and sporting goods.
The retailer began in 1849 as a small grocer's shop on what later became modern-day Brompton Road. Charles Henry Harrod, a wholesale grocer and tea merchant, started the company.
In 1861 his son, Charles Digby Harrod, bought the store from his father and added medicines, perfumes, stationery, fruit and vegetables. Home furnishings were added later in the 1800s.
Now, more than a century later, the Harrods Fine Furniture Collection, the retailer's first major foray into licensing, has joined the distinguished mix at Harrods.
The company's motto, chiseled into the façade under the store's baroque dome, still rings true today: "Omnia Omnibus Ubique," or Everything for Everybody, Everywhere.
| Several pieces from the Harrods Fine Furniture Collection are featured in the store's famous Brompton Road display windows, seen by millions of passers-by each week. |
| Harrods Chairman Mohamed Al Fayed attends the launch of the Harrods Fine Furniture Collection. His face, top right, is part of a fireplace display in the showroom that features the new furniture line. |
| ABOVE: The flag-bedecked exterior of Harrods, topped by a baroque dome, is a beacon for shoppers from around the world. |
| LEFT: Bill Mitchell, the creator of the Egyptian escalators at Harrods, with a sphinx that bears a striking resemblance to the artist himself. |
| RIGHT: At the top of the Egyptian escalators is a fifth- floor ceiling decorated with an astronomical relief of the night sky. The relief features the signs of the zodiac, depicted in gold. |
| BELOW: Live models in the store's display windows add to the excitement at the unveiling of Harrods' new furniture line, produced by Highland House. |
| Interior designers Judith Robison Bullard, left, and Dorlies Rasmussen, both with Designing Women & Associates of Fort Collins, Colo., were part of a group of U.S. guests at the furniture premier, and got a chimney sweep's view of London from the rooftop of Harrods. |
| This permanent shrine in Harrods pays tribute to Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, the son of Harrods Chairman Mohamed Al Fayed. Diana and Dodi were killed in a Paris traffic accident four years ago. The shrine includes the engagement ring that Dodi bought for Diana. |
