The Peninsula’s newest dining destination — a view restaurant that sits atop two floors and 40,000 square feet of home furnishing inspiration — will make its debut Friday at Stanford Shopping Center. Called RH Palo Alto, the Gallery at Stanford, this is the company’s fourth Bay Area gallery, after San Francisco, Yountville and Marin, and its first for Silicon Valley. RH operates galleries around the world, with recent openings in Brussels, England’s Cotswolds, Munich and Dusseldorf.
The gallery, set in a northeast corner of the center’s property, replaces the longtime RH presence on University Avenue. That legacy store is closing at the end of business today. “We believe great architecture amplifies and renders our product and brand more valuable,” RH Chairman and CEO Gary Friedman said in an email.
“We either find great historical architecture and re-adapt it” — in San Francisco, the company renovated the vintage 1917 Bethlehem Steel behemoth — “Or we build it. RH Palo Alto is an entirely new design built from the ground up.” The galleries blend retail, design and restaurant functions in one location.
Friedman said this concept creates spaces for consumers that “cannot be replicated online.” At the Stanford center, customers will enter a spacious first-floor gallery with 13-foot ceilings where room-size displays of furnishing collections, enhanced by pieces collected by Friedman on his world travels, are arranged under contemporary RH chandeli.