GRAND CENTRAL OPTICAL
340 Madison Avenue, New York, NY
Completion Date: 2023
Category: Interior, Small Projects

The new Grand Central Optical shop on Madison Avenue in Midtown Manhattan is the eighth retail space that the architects have designed for this purveyor of fashion eyewear, a 100 year old family-owned business. The company has long maintained a flagship establishment within Grand Central Terminal as well as a satellite store nearby on Madison Avenue; cyclical lease renewals and relocations have triggered multiple renovations by the same architects. This partnership has, since 1995, forged a critical unity between sophisticated, but welcoming, store design and the company’s brand identity; refreshed with each new iteration.

Occupying a deep, narrow, 960 sf space, the minimalist interior allows GCO’s wide selection of optical frames to star. The key feature of the design is a thirty-foot-long internally lit glass sales counter. Balancing site-specific innovation with established visual identity, the architects carried the materials palette over from previous Grand Central Optical venues, including clear and frosted glass, stainless steel, dark rubber flooring, and a single accent color—in this location, a soft teal. The store’s trademark super-graphic of eyeglass frames is applied to the back-lit frosted glass wall of one of the store’s two exam rooms, creating a strong visual focus at the end of the main sales space. The rear zone of the ground floor contains pre-exam and contact lens areas, and a newly built mezzanine houses the business office and mechanical equipment. An internal stair connects to a lower-level workshop where eyeglasses are custom fabricated, enabling the superior customer service for which Grand Central Optical is known.