"We've had our eye on Paramus for some time," said Pierre Bernardo, general manager of the U.S. Northeast for Roche Bobois. "Paramus is a good shopping destination for everybody who lives in New Jersey."
Roche Bobois had a previous relationship with Paramus. Another furniture company, Maurice Villency, had a franchise agreement to sell Roche Bobois furniture, and had a Roche Bobois display at its store on the southbound side of Route 17 during the 1990s. Maurice Villency ended its franchise agreement in the early 2000s, and eventually closed all of its stores.
Roche Bobois' 6,000-square-foot store opened in the newly redeveloped Paramus Design Center complex at 776 Route 17 north last month, with the grand opening held last week.
"Northern New Jersey is a logical, wealthy and fashion-forward market" for Roche Bobois, and one of the top 12 markets in the United States, said Jerry Epperson, a furniture analyst at Mann Armistead & Epperson, a Richmond, Va.-based investment banking and research firm. "The formula that Roche Bobois uses" — of locating stores in major cities and affluent suburbs – "has proven successful for several decades now in the United States," he said.
The Paramus store is Roche Bobois' 27th U.S. location. It has more than 250 showrooms around the world.
Roche Bobois, a family-owned company that started in the 1950s by bringing Scandinavian contemporary furniture to Paris, today sells its own designs made in Western Europe, with an emphasis on environmental sustainability. The company has collaborated with fashion designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier, Sonia Rykiel and Missoni to add flair and colorful fabrics to its furniture. Prices for sofas range from $4,000 to as much as $24,000 for premium custom designs, putting the brand squarely in the luxury category.
The Roche Bobois look is "very contemporary, streamlined, but the furniture does a lot of things. There are moving parts to it," said interior designer Barbara Ostrom, who designed a room using Roche Bobois furniture at a fundraising showcase at a Saddle River home last fall. Backs of sofas and couches can slide forward or back, tables can be made longer or shorter with a remote control, and pieces can form modular furniture setups. "It's very sophisticated. Very European," Ostrom said. "They also have a line where they do traditional elements, but they pep it up. They overscale the furniture, like French chairs that become overscaled and done in interesting finishes," she said.
Route 17 in Paramus has been called "furniture alley" by real estate brokers and landlords because of the surge in new furniture store leases as the country emerged from the recession that ended in 2009. Eight furniture stores opened within a three-mile radius around Paramus during an 18-month period between 2011 and 2013. With additional store openings in 2014 and 2015, more than a dozen furniture stores are clustered on Routes 17 and 4.
At the Paramus Design Center, Roche Bobois is neighbors with a high-end American furniture retailer, Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams. The 100,000-square-foot shopping center is in negotiations with other furniture and home furnishings retailers.
Nicholas Laganella, the developer of the Paramus Design Center, said he decided to give the complex a design theme after landing the Equinox gym as his first tenant. The gym was bringing the type of customers to the center who want to buy quality home furnishings, Laganella said. The location of the center, at the north end of Paramus, makes it easily accessible to people from Saddle River, Ho-Ho-Kus, Woodcliff Lake, Ridgewood and other affluent North Jersey towns, he said.
Laganella said he hopes to announce additional furniture and home-furnishing tenants soon. "We're trying to round it out, so we have a little bit of everything," he said, "so if an interior designer comes here with a client who has just built a 12,000-square-foot home in Saddle River they need to fill, they can go to a number of different stores."
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