First Look: Henne’s First Perth Store Lets the Clothes Do “All the Talking”

This weekend, Henne opens its third store in Australia – its first in Perth. “Perth’s actually been on our radar for a really long time. We have a really strong customer base here online,” co-founder Nadia Bartel says. “We realised a lot of our customers from Perth were actually coming into our Armadale and Greville Street stores over the past few years.”

Now, Perth has something to call its own. Henne has chosen a shopfront in Claremont Quarter to settle down in. Like the other Henne boutiques, this one sits snug on the ground floor, facing the street. “I just felt like Claremont really aligned with our Henne customer. It felt like there was a really great fashion customer here, and it also [has] that lifestyle element; it’s really close to the beach,” Bartel says. 

Bartel is speaking from “sunny” Perth, though the new store fit-out is anything but. Working alongside Alexandra Ponting of APDH (who also designed Henne’s Armadale store), the greyscale store channels the ’90s minimalism found in the Armadale space, but ramps it up a notch. 

“We just wanted it to feel really strong and sleek; [there’s] not too much in the space,” Bartel says. “We’ve kept it pretty sleek and minimal. We really want our clothes to do all the talking.”

There’s a sense of constraint in this store, a conscious paring back of styling and colour. This was Ponting’s intention, who strove to create “strong, alluring energy”. In lieu of an expansive colour palette, Ponting played with light and texture through mirrored and glossy surfaces to create depth. 

She’s particularly fond of the store’s epoxy gloss “shiny charcoal floor” and the “black ceiling”. It’s a departure from every other Henne boutique that prioritises lightness and airiness. What has continued, though, is the store’s mix of vintage and custom furniture.

“The interplay of leather and open-weave fabric, wire-haired glass and steel, [and] floating and sinking furniture [is] designed to feel effortless, yet precise,” Ponting says. There’s eye-catching lighting by Barcelona-based designer Max Milá Serra and clever grid-laid Barrisol lighting over the change rooms. Lived-in leather couches and floor-grazing curtains add a subdued softness.

According to Bartel, Perth customers gravitate to lightweight fabrications and lighter tones, like taupes, tans and blues. As is customary with its store launches, the Perth boutique will have first dibs on four limited-edition colourways: the Maiken tank in aqua, the Carr T-shirt in ice blue, the Zeya Polo in charcoal and the Reese shorts in tan.

Opening up three stores in four years (with more soon to be announced) means you learn a lot about your customers, quickly. The womenswear label tackled complaints of long queues by opening bigger stores and adding in more change rooms, and is now focused on store functionality and back-of-house efficiency. “We have quite a large amount of our team working back-of-house, and they feed the product through to us. It happens in a very quick way, because our stores do get really busy,” Bartel says.

While the store’s aesthetics might not ooze warmth, warmth is what Bartel hopes the store will embody. “I want [customers] to feel the warmth. I want them to think that it’s a space that they can relax [in], and really touch and feel the product. We just really want them to feel a part of our brand.” 

Henne Perth

9 Bay View Terrace, Claremont

(08) 62884907

Hours:

Mon to Fri 9:30am-5:30pm

Sat 9am-5pm

Sun 11am-5pm

henne.com.au

@henne_