RH Newport Beach, a 97,000-square-foot “immersive” furniture store, opened Friday at Fashion Island.

Officially called RH Newport Beach, The Gallery at Fashion Island, it’s the largest store of its kind for the retailer formerly known as Restoration Hardware.

The ocean-facing store three years in the making rises four levels along the western side of the Newport Beach retail center.

Property owner Irvine Company announced plans for the RH expansion in November 2021 . To make room, Forever 21 and Cheesecake Factory structures were demolished.

HR CEO Gary Friedman is reinventing the Corte Madera-based company, leaning into a luxury market that’s about more than just shopping.

In an earnings call with investors held Thursday, Dec. 12, Friedman said RH has “worked hard to destroy the former version of ourselves” as it created a “disruptive” brand.

He said the gallery spaces like the one now in Orange County are meant to “blur the lines between residential and retail, indoors and outdoors, home and hospitality.” Shoppers at RH can expect not just retail showrooms but also garden courtyards, rooftop restaurants, wine and barista bars. “Spaces that activate all of the senses; and spaces that cannot be replicated online,” the CEO said.

The Fashion Island location also includes RH’s first in-store Waterworks showroom, a 3,000-square-foot space dedicated to bathroom fixtures, tile and cabinetry.

The debut of such a massive furniture store comes with some risks, especially the chilled housing market, which has seen sales stall as homeowners sit on low mortgage rates.

Friedman in the earnings call shared a positive take on the downturn:

“Quite frankly, sometimes, I talk internally about, ‘Hey, I hope the housing market stays flat for another year.’ We’ll have a lot less competitors if it does. We’ll gain a lot more market share if it does.”

He also said the company, so far, is not expecting “a negative impact” on its margins because of impending tariff hikes by President-elect Donald Trump.

“We have been proactively moving sourcing away from China over the past several years with the expectation of fully exiting the country by the end of the second quarter” in 2025, he said.

The company posted a net profit in its third quarter of $33.2 million, compared with a loss of $2.2 million, for the same period in 2023.

RH Newport Beach includes three floors of retail space, plus RH Ocean Grill, a 270-seat indoor-outdoor rooftop restaurant; two wine and barista bars and an interior design atelier (workshop).

To make way for the behemoth near the beach, RH is closing three smaller stores in Orange County, the company said.

Those locations include the original RH at Fashion Island, the store at South Coast Plaza, and another at The Shops at Mission Viejo. The RH Outlet in Irvine will remain.

To the east, the company is opening its first standalone RH Interior Design Office in Palm Desert. Friedman said RH eventually will add a 10,000-square-foot design gallery and a freestanding 5,000-square-foot RH outdoor furniture gallery on the same Palm Desert street.

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