Adding Style to Greenwich Avenue

On the heels of a star-studded preview, it was all business Friday when RH — the reincarnation of Restoration Hardware — opened its doors in the historically significant former Greenwich Post Office on Greenwich Avenue.

Several dozen RH employees were joined by onlookers, town officials and the man who bought the post office — real estate magnate Peter Malkin of Greenwich — gathered for the official ribbon cutting ceremony. The event marked the culmination of 14 months of construction and rehabilitation of the 1917 neoclassical building that had served as Greenwich's main post office until 2012. Malkin's holding company purchased the building from the Postal Service that's decommissioning many facilities around the country, for $15 million.

Malkin's firm partnered with RH to create a home design center in the heart of Greenwich's downtown. Restoration Hardware's former outpost — a block away, at the corner of East Elm and Greenwich Avenue, is supposed to remain open until mid-summer when all operations will be transferred to the former post office site, a spokeswoman said. However, the windows of the space have been covered in brown paper since earlier this week and there are security guards posted at the doors. 

Where postal customers used to queue up to mail their packages and buy stamps is now an soaring entry where bespoke tables, lighting accoutrements and bedding and seating arrangements are artfully displayed.

There is now a second story where dining and seating arrangements are housed — a space that went unused and undeveloped, said RH chairman CEO Gary Friedman. Friedman said when he visited the original Greenwich store a couple years ago, he noticed the post office's architectural attributes and photographed it.

When a business associate mentioned that another historically significant post office, in Westport, was on the U.S Postal Service's decommissioning list, Friedman said, he already set his sights on Greenwich.

"We reimagined how the building would have been used today... there is a second level in the edifice," Friedman said. "It's a great retail structure."

After a rather rowdy countdown to cut the ribbon with First Selectman Peter Tesei, the crowds entered the building. 

"They really captured the fine points of the building ... to look out and see the (World War I) monument and the Old Town Hall," Tesei said.

Malkin said he hopes that his project will become the "prototype for adpatice reuse of historically significant post offices."

At a sneak-peek preview of the building Thursday, May 15, actresses Uma Thurman and Kelly Rutherford, Town and Country magazine editor-in-chief Jay Fielden attended the event.