Echoes of Deco

When the pedigreed Printemps—its flagship located on Boulevard Haussmann in Paris since 1865—landed at 1 Wall Street this March, the luxury retailer went out of its way to convince New Yorkers that it was “not a department store.” The more I roamed the corridors of the grand magasin, festooned with brass, terrazzo, brocade curtains, and Italian glass, the more I was convinced its stunt marketing campaign wasn’t lying. On the Saturday afternoon I visited, the place was crowded with tourists throwing back white wine. I counted at least nine different blancs available by the twenty-dollar glass at five in-store restaurants and decided that if Printemps is not a department store, then it must be a shopping- themed bar. The wino magnet, which sprawls some 55,000 square feet across two floors of Ralph Walker’s 1931 limestone office building, bears some resemblance to Le Monsieur, the cocktail lounge that pop-baroque maniac Baz Luhrmann opened in January in the West Village. Both mix art deco and art nouveau, Boom Boom’s excess flirting with the fairy-tale flourishes of Rom…