A glasshouse dining room under hanging plants, set for lunch
Emotional architecture

Rooms people didn’t want to leave.

Before Bureau St. James, the work was places: stores, streets and gardens, made by the design studio James built and the teams around it. Every one began with the same question. What should it feel like to walk in?

A living wall of plants rising beside a staircase
IRegent Street London · 2009

A garden that climbed three stories up the middle of London’s busiest street.

Anthropologie’s arrival in Europe. Retailer of the Year at the International Retail Design Conference. With Apt.

A shopfront on the King’s Road under a curtain of hanging plants
IIKing’s Road London

As if it had always been there.

A listed 1912 billiard hall, reopened as Anthropologie. With Apt.

The Urban Outfitters sign lit at the corner of Broadway and West 35th Street
IIIHerald Square New York

Coffee, a haircut, and a Saturday gone.

Urban Outfitters’ flagship: three floors and 56,000 square feet on Broadway at 35th Street. With David A. Levy & Associates.

A skylit dining room in a converted warehouse
IVSpace Ninety 8 Williamsburg

A warehouse the neighborhood could keep rewriting.

Four floors of an old Brooklyn warehouse, with a roof over the bridge. For Urban Outfitters, with David A. Levy & Associates.

An open courtyard at dusk under a steel canopy
VSpace 24 Twenty Austin

A yard on the Drag, built to be taken over.

A courtyard across from the University of Texas, for music, food and whoever showed up. For Urban Outfitters.

A brick Tudor archway over a wet courtyard
VIWestport Connecticut · 2016

You came for lunch and stayed the afternoon.

A Tudor mansion that used to be the town’s YMCA, reopened as Anthropologie & Co. With NewStudio Architecture.

A glasshouse café with trees growing inside it
VIIDevon Yard Outside Philadelphia

A village green, written into the zoning before a single wall went up.

A store, a glasshouse café, a garden center and a courtyard, carried from zoning through approvals into construction. With NewStudio Architecture.

Some of these rooms have closed since, as rooms do. Rooms close. Worlds don’t.

No world belongs to one person, one team or one store. But its doors are where people step into it, and together they set the tone for everything behind them.

Made with the studio James built, and the architects, builders and brand teams who made them real.
Work with the house Back to the house