DORÉ

About five months ago I stepped into Hayward House and immediately saw that it was a retail experience like no other. Hayward House is located in the Grosvenor Atterbury Mansion in the Upper East Side and contains the flagship store of the brand Hayward, founded by Marin Hopper (daughter of Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward). Part retail, part home, part old New York, Hayward House contains thoughtful details at every turn.

Yesterday I dragged Bogdana to the Upper East Side to photograph this beauty of a store, and she left with her jaw dropped, commenting it doesn’t get much more New York than that. While Bogdana snapped away, I sat down and chatted with Marin about how Hayward House came about and the family details she infused in every corner.

Marin: We were in Los Angeles making Hayward products and we wanted to move the production to New York. Then someone said, “you know, you have all these archives and mementos that tell the story of the brand, you should really find a store or space that shows your story.”

We moved the production to New York and my husband, John, who is my business partner, was walking down Madison Avenue and ran into a friend of his. They stood there talking on the street corner about what John and I were looking for, in terms of real estate, to house our flagship store, and a real estate person was standing next to them and said,”oh my gosh, I’m sorry to overhear your conversation. I have this space in this crazy old mansion on 70th Street that sounds like the kind of place you might be interested in seeing. It’s not on the market yet.”

Since I was very young, 70th street, between Park and Lexington, has always been my favorite street. It’s just so beautiful. It feels like London and old New York. I’ve always loved to walk down this block. So when John called me and said he was looking at a building on 70th between Park and Lexington I was like, “what?! You’re kidding?!”

I came to see it and I was like, “Oh My God.” It was originally Grosvenor Atterbury’s house, but after he sold it, I guess in the 40s or late 30s, it was changed into a hair salon.

Marin: But the hair salon owners had taken nothing out, they just built over everything. They built over the windows and they created a different entrance and there was a disco ball! And in the other room were all the sinks and manicure stations. We thought the ceiling was painted black, but it was just lacquered from all the years of hair spray. It was really decrepit in here. I wanted to restore it to how Grosvenor Atterbury wanted it to look. I wanted to make this rich, deep paneling part of the Hayward experience. Which feels true to New York and the Upper East side.

We got these extraordinary painters to come and restore it and they restored all the wood and we decided we really wanted to make the living room a destination, and create a living room for Hayward, the archives, and the whole story of the brand. For example, the portrait of Slim Keith (pictured below) is a painting of a photograph my mother (Brooke Hayward) had on her desk of Slim, because Slim was not only her step-mother, but someone she was very close to, even after she divorced my grandfather, Leland Hayward, and was kind of like a Godmother of sorts.

And in the bathroom we depicted the family tree with photographs and we print the family tree on the tissue paper in the shopping bags as well.

Marin: The renovation was about a year and a half. It was a lot, but, you know, it was really worth it and I feel so proud of the space and I feel really happy that people can come here and have a coffee, have a drink, attend an event for a book launch or a collaboration we’re working on.

When we first opened the store– we made these soft bags. We became very popular for our kind of animation in our bags and our textiles. So, we are so happy to be able to show our things in a place conducive to the storytelling.