Tiffany & Co. has unveiled its most anticipated and largest store opening of the year, a new 15,000-square-foot store at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa designed by Peter Marino. More than a boutique, it is the latest expression of the jeweler’s evolving retail vision, where architecture, contemporary art, and high jewelry are given equal billing.
The project continues a decades-long collaboration with between Marino and Tiffany. Like the Landmark on New York’s Fifth Avenue, which reopened in 2023 after a sweeping renovation, the South Coast Plaza store treats shopping as a cultural experience as much as a commercial one.
From the moment visitors step into the store, digital landscapes by artist Oyoram project sweeping views of the Southern California coastline, drawing inspiration from nearby Newport Beach and Laguna Beach. A suspended light sculpture by French architect Hugh Dutton anchors the main floor, illuminating many of Tiffany’s signature collections, including Bird on a Rock, HardWear, Knot, Lock, T, and Sixteen Stone.
Throughout the boutique, jewelry shares space with museum-worthy artworks. Damien Hirst‘s Tiffany Miraculous, Tiffany Smashing, Tiffany Adorable, and Tiffany Dish welcome visitors to the World of Tiffany, while Michelangelo Pistoletto‘s Color and Light and Vik Muniz‘s Water Lilies after Monet occupy dedicated salons. In the High Jewelry galleries, Tiffany Cosmos by Urs Fischer sits alongside a rare Tiffany Studios lamp, reinforcing the house’s longstanding dialogue between fine art and craftsmanship.
What grounds the store in California specifically is a selection of Tiffany Archive objects tied to the region’s gemological history. For the first time, Tiffany is exhibiting a specimen of morganite from Mesa Grande, California, on loan from a private collection. The display also celebrates kunzite, the lavender gemstone first identified in California and named after Tiffany’s legendary chief gemologist, George Frederick Kunz, whose discoveries helped establish the house as one of America’s foremost authorities on colored gemstones.
Like the Landmark on Fifth Avenue before it, South Coast Plaza is part of Tiffany & Co.’s larger ambition to make its boutiques cultural destinations in their own right. Architecture, art, and jewelry exist on equal footing, while each location takes cues from its surroundings. Here, that vision is filtered through a distinctly Californian lens, weaving together the region’s coastline, artistic heritage, and surprisingly rich gemological history into a store that captures the spirit of Southern California while remaining unmistakably Tiffany.
