LongonBigD wrote:What gives? This got me to wondering. Perhaps we are just getting a generic RH Gallery building. Looking at RH website, this design appears to also be the West Hollywood store and the Leawood (Kansas City) look. If so, that’s very disappointing for Knox Street considering what could have been.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. One of the companies most recent earnings letters says:
"We’ve also made further improvements to our real estate development model, and continue to reduce capital requirements for future Galleries by improving deal economics and lowering construction costs. While all of our new Galleries scheduled to open in fiscal 2019 are under construction, we were able to lower capital requirements for three of the five new Galleries planned for next year, and the vast majority of future projects."
Now that they've proven out the larger gallery format stores work, they're naturally as a business going to try and boil it down to a simpler form to get a better return on capital. If you look at their stock price they were on a pretty significant rise from Jan '17 - Mid '18 and have somewhat languished/recently had trouble. Building very ornate stores when not necessarily needed doesn't help that, even though it's definitely disappointing for knox.