Galloping Through the Park: MVRDV designs shop window for Hermès

Working inside a building they designed in 2016, Crystal Houses, MVRDV created a narrative-driven design to occupy the shop window of Hermès for the summer of 2025, titled Galloping Through the Park. Made of brightly-coloured, 3D-printed elements, the design shows a horse, which former Hermès CEO Jean-Louis Dumas liked to call the “first client” of the house, arriving in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark to be draped in Hermès finery by a chorus of birds. This seemingly simple story ties together multiple overlapping narratives and design challenges – from recalling the building’s original design concept to referencing the iconography of the house of Hermès, and from responding to the Hermès theme of the year to resolving the challenge of designing a “shop window” set in a façade that is entirely transparent.

Completed in 2016, Crystal Houses uses glass bricks, glass window frames, and glass architraves to create a flagship storefront that maintains the architectural character of the area. At the same time, it sits within a broader fascination in the MVRDV oeuvre with the symbolic and social consequences of transparency – also visible in designs such as 133 Wai Yip Street in Hong Kong or the Infinity Kitchen concept. To that end, one of the key inspirations for the Hermès design was a concept image that envisioned Crystal Houses as a fully transparent building, providing a clear view from PC Hooftstraat to the Vondelpark behind. This image provided the inspiration for including a park setting in the story.

A parallel point of departure for the design was the Hermès theme of the year, “Drawn to Craft”, which aimed at highlighting and celebrating the creative process of the shop window designers themselves. Reflecting on the identity of MVRDV, the designers looked not to hand sketches or carefully crafted architectural renders, but to computer-aided wireframe drawings, reflecting the office’s longstanding affinity for digital production methods. Typically presented in multiple bright colours that signify different functional “layers”, these drawings were translated into brightly coloured, 3D-printed elements.

Produced by Amsterdam-based Aectual, these elements use upcycled plastic where possible – for example, the upcycled orange plastic of the horse and the bicycle was sourced from the travelling kiosk of Le Monde d’Hermès – and all of the 3D-printed material can be returned to Aectual for recycling again at the end of the shop window’s run.

In many cases, the elements further reference digital drawings with their symbolic hatch patterns, such as the wavy lines signifying clouds or the chaine d’ancre, a classic Hermès motif, that marks the body of the horse. The “layers” of digital drawings were reinterpreted as physical layers – eight of them in total – and the scene fills the majority of the two-storey shopfront, making full use of the building’s transparency.

Quintessential scenes from the park offer a wide range of opportunities to display Hermès products. Birds carry Twilly scarves and the Mini PicnicKelly in Jaune de Naple bag, seemingly greeting the horse; the bicycle carries a bag on its luggage rack; the bridge carries the Avalon H Club blanket; shoes sit among the grass; and the horse itself is complete with an Hermès Cavale II jumping saddle, a reminder of the origins of the house.

By preserving the ideal of transparency inherited from both the building design and the digital drawing concept, the scene is made as readable from the inside of the store looking out as it is from the outside looking in. This creates an immersive sensation that is reinforced by the recordings of the park that are played at various moments throughout the day, transporting visitors to another place – but one that might feel familiar, and not too far away.

See more of Galloping Through the Park here.