Sundae School opens its first store, a Chinatown calm escape

Sundae School did not open its first store like a typical downtown flag. It opened like a breath. At 117 Hester Street, the Korean American label has turned a 500-square-foot former accounting office in Manhattan’s Chinatown into something closer to a quiet corridor than a sales floor, a temple-inspired room built to slow down one of New York’s busiest blocks.

That idea comes straight from founder and creative director Dae Lim, who said monthly temple visits in Korea shaped the space’s mood and purpose. Sundae School’s first permanent store is meant to deliver the brand’s signature “mental vacation,” a phrase that now reads less like branding language and more like retail strategy. In a city where luxury often means speed, access and maximalism, Lim is betting on stillness, a small but pointed pivot that feels right for shoppers who want atmosphere as much as apparel.

The design, developed over three years with Nohar Agadi, formerly of Foster + Partners, and co-architect and sculptor Andy Kim, translates a traditional Korean Buddhist temple into fashion retail. Floor-to-ceiling pastel pink curtains soften the room; metal pillars and gates break it into transitional spaces; works by South Korea-based artist Honey Kim add another layer of texture. The result is more sanctuary than showroom, and it is intentionally modest, with the brand saying the store is meant to function as a community center for indie brands, pop-ups and creatives, not as a cash machine.

The merchandise matches the setting. Sundae School’s latest apparel and in-store exclusives include embroidered hoodies, tie-clasp outerwear and hanbok-inspired pieces, the kind of streetwear that looks most convincing when it carries its cultural references lightly and with confidence. On the brand’s own site, Sundae School describes itself as a Korean streetwear boutique with a philosophy of “Smokewear born in Korea, remixed with counterculture,” and the storefront extends that thesis into physical space.

The location gives the opening a neat sense of return. Lim first launched Sundae School in 2018 in an apartment just three blocks away, and Hypebeast noted that the brand arrived at this flagship eight years after it began as a thought experiment in nearby New York housing. The store does not carry Sundae Flowers, Sundae School’s sister brand that sells tapioca-based THC gummies, keeping the fashion edit clean and focused. Chinatown itself, established in the 1870s and grown from a three-block core to more than 55 square blocks, has long been a place of movement and reinvention. Sundae School is trying to add a rarer commodity: calm.