Danielle Frankel, the designer known for her imaginative and original approach to bridal dressing, is standing in the most tranquil and serene of rooms. She is looking equally beatific, even if just beyond the room’s buttery yellow walls there’s a frenzy of activity—the kind of banging, sawing, and hammering that loudly announces We’re busy—going on. Frankel is giving me a Zoom tour of her Melrose Place boutique mere days before it opens, and while I’d expected someone to just FaceTime me with an iPhone, that’s simply not Frankel’s style. Uh huh, no: Typical of her exacting attention to, well, absolutely every single little thing, she has hired a small film crew to livestream this walkthrough.
If Frankel is preternaturally calm, it may be because—the last few moments of intense work on top of eight long months of renovations aside—her cherished dream of opening a space in her hometown of Los Angeles is finally within reach. (She grew up a 10-minute drive away.) “We really wanted to be in this neighborhood,” she says of the search that she and Joshua Hirsch, her husband and the company’s CEO, undertook. “After looking for two years, we were close to signing a lease on another space, but then we saw this before it went on the market, and I was like, ‘Yep—this is the spot.’”
Frankel’s instincts didn’t fail her. Over 4,000-square-feet of prime Melrose Place real estate, sandwiched between stores from Oscar de la Renta and The Row, and with a stunning courtyard greeting you as you walk into the store, the LA Danielle Frankel boutique will be her first retail location proper (her midtown New York atelier doubles as a design studio and place for people to shop). Both places were designed by interior decorator Augusta Hoffman, who Frankel first met when Hoffman came to her for her wedding dress.
“There was something about Augusta’s aura that I was like, ‘I really want to work with this person’,” Frankel says. “I loved her taste, too; she just felt like the right person to partner with.” Given Frankel’s job, she’s unsurprisingly big on harmonious unions—but they were particularly in sync because each believed that the boutique’s interior should be, says Frankel, “clean, sharp, design-focused, but also focused on what’s happening in the space—it had to feel comfortable and homey, not intimidating. Augusta doesn’t really do retail projects, she does homes, and that’s perfect: I want someone to come into the boutique and feel like they’re in my living room.”
The butter yellow color of the room—Frankel chose it long before it became the hue of the moment—was arrived at after trying out 14 different options to see which worked best in the LA light. It is one of two rooms which will allow Frankel’s clients to shop with a sense of privacy and intimacy. Despite this one being the size of an average New York apartment, it manages to feel cocooning and comfortable thanks to its tasseled ceiling-to-floor drapes, the softness of which contrasts with the curvilinear furniture, such as a 1940s-style arching sofa and walnut trimmed Jean-Michel Frank-esque armchairs. Adjacent to this design reverie is an adjacent fitting room—also, size-wise, it has to be said, akin to a Manhattan studio apartment.
From there, Frankel—film crew in tow—makes her way through an airy, light-filled reception area and retail space where you might, when you drop by, pick up some shoes or accessories and moves on to the second room, where brides-to-be can discreetly shop Frankel’s dresses. It is decorated in the most exquisite shade somewhere between celery and pistachio, with this delicate but distinctive color also stringently wall-tested. (There was another litmus test for this and the creamy yellow room: How good would Frankel’s ivory dresses look against the palette?)
A tad smaller, this room’s focal point is a monumental ebony ivy-leaf chandelier, which overlooks two armchairs (possessed of a very Frank Lloyd Wright spirit), a scrolling wrought iron stool—Frankel tells me she has an obsession with anything wrought iron—and shell-like sconces which Frankel found in a Paris flea market. (They were a replacement for the original sconces, which she decided against at the 11th hour—it’s all in the attention to detail, people!) This space is so gorgeous, so incandescently Old Hollywood-meets-new-Los Angeles, that if I was here shopping for a dress to get married in, I’d dump the planned wedding venue and just get hitched at the boutique instead.
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Frankel spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of ambience she wanted to create with the boutique’s design, which she calls, “very Angeleno.” Because choosing a dress is already so emotionally loaded, the vibe of the space you’re shopping has to be intuitively in touch with the customer’s state of mind. “We have the luxury of privacy here,” Frankel says. “We don’t want anyone to feel pressured; the rooms are spacious so clients can feel like they have space to think, as well as space to try on. In the end,” she continued, “customer service is as important as the aesthetics.”
Frankel is also cognizant that her team is there to help, to advise, and to provide counsel. When someone books an appointment (the fee is $150, redeemable against the dress order), they’re sent a questionnaire to complete that will be used to figure out exactly what should be hanging on the custom racks. “We pre-curate everything before a client arrives,” says Frankel. “We ask: What do you like? Who’s the wedding planner? Where are you getting married? We want to maximize our time for her.” The custom racks, incidentally, were designed by Frankel so that the spacing of each dress is exactly the same. “Everything will look consistent, as it drives me crazy when it’s not,” she says, laughing.
Before you try on anything, though, you have to cross the threshold—that incredible courtyard. Frankel has set it up to be as welcoming as everywhere else, with modern sectional sofas and mid-century Walter Lamb for Brown Jordan tables and seating. Initially floored in concrete, it’s now covered in brick inlay to give it some organic warmth, with strategically placed Boxwood Japonica in locally sourced vintage urns to echo the foliage of the trees hand-painted onto the plasterwork walls. Screw your eyes up and for a second you could be in Tuscany.
With our tour at an end, Frankel is now out by the main entrance, still serene and tranquil even in the brighter-than-bright California morning sunshine. “I fell in love with the courtyard,” she says. “Someone can come here, have a coffee, sit in this dreamy antique furniture, and just hang here for a minute with her family before they look at the dresses. I’m so proud of this whole space, because we couldn’t have done it in the past,” she continues. “We have such a bigger sense of who we are now—and what our women want.”
Danielle Frankel, 8475 Melrose Place, Los Angeles, California 90069; for appointments, email melroseplace@daniellefrankelstudio.com.