In the heart of SoHo, New York, Acne Studios’ new flagship at 33 Greene Street designed by Barcelona-based Arquitectura-G is less a store than a spatial experiment in precision and softness.
The 7,000-square-foot interior doubles the brand’s former footprint, transforming two neighboring storefronts into a single, coherent landscape. The result is an exercise in measured juxtapositions—hard angles offset by tactile surfaces, industrial memory refracted through mint-hued translucency.
Working closely with Acne Studios’ creative director Jonny Johansson, Arquitectura-G drew from references of sharp geometries that resist becoming brutal. Instead, the space explores angles as subtle gestures—edges that fold into translucency, glass planes that both divide and open. The fitting rooms, housed within monumental triangular volumes of frosted glass, structure the store with a quiet authority. These crystalline forms create not only zones of privacy but also a rhythm of spatial articulation, setting a cadence for movement across the interior.
What grounds this landscape of glass and light is its soft underlay: wall-to-wall wool carpeting in a muted shade echoing the mint-tinted panels. Produced by Kasthall, the Swedish textile manufacturer and longtime Acne collaborator, the flooring wraps the sharpness in warmth, dissolving acoustics and adding a domestic intimacy to what might otherwise verge on the austere. It is this balance—glass and wool, translucency and tactility—that gives the store its distinctive pulse.
Lighting, too, plays an integral role in anchoring the design within its industrial context. French designer Benoît Lalloz’s graphic fixtures hang overhead, their linear intensity recalling the warehouse vernacular of SoHo’s past. Yet their precision aligns with Johansson’s vision of an understated futurism, reinforcing the store’s hybrid identity: a place rooted in neighborhood history while unapologetically forward-looking.
Beyond aesthetics, the expanded flagship reflects Acne Studios’ evolving commercial strategy. By unifying men’s, women’s, footwear, and accessories under one roof, the brand acknowledges a growing culture of cross-shopping between genders. The 60/40 split in sales, favoring women, is now reflected in the store’s presentation, suggesting a nuanced awareness of how consumers actually move across categories.
Acne Studios’ Greene Street flagship, in its architectural language, is a study in precision without severity, a space that sharpens and softens in equal measure.
