A luxury eyewear brand has its sights set on one of SoHo’s most high-profile retail vacancies.
South Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster has inked a 28,500-square-foot deal at the Kushner Companies’ Puck Building, Commercial Observer has learned. The lease term is more than 10 years, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.
It’s unclear when Gentle Monster will arrive at 295 Lafayette Street, but it will take over a portion of the city’s much-mourned REI flagship, which spanned 35,000 square feet and ceased operations in July. The leftover portion of REI’s former space will be occupied by Italian restaurant Torrisi, which will expand its current 4,000-square-foot eatery at the base of the Puck Building, the source said.
“We are incredibly excited to welcome Gentle Monster to the Puck Building,” Nicole Kushner Meyer, president of Kushner, said in a statement. “Puck is a special asset where heritage, modernism and culture come together, and we have been very intentional about bringing in brands and companies that share that same connection.
“Gentle Monster’s creativity, global perspective and approach to experiential retail make them a natural fit for the building,” Meyer added. “This lease also marks an important milestone for us, completing the full transition of the Puck Building to an exceptional new generation of tenants while preserving the character and legacy that have always made it so iconic.”
While Gentle Monster’s new space may seem unusually large for such a niche accessories brand, the Romanesque Revival office building may just be the eyewear maker’s perfect fit. Gentle Monster’s flagship stores are well known for their gallery-like designs and surrealist art installations. At the brand’s current SoHo location at 70 Wooster Street, for example, shoppers are greeted with massive, hyper-realistic robotic faces.
It’s unclear whether the Puck Building deal will prompt a relocation from the brand’s current Wooster Street home.
Cornelia Street Partners’ Lenny Kohlmayer and Evan Kleinberg negotiated the lease on behalf of Gentle Monster, while Ripco Real Estate’s Richard Skulnik and Lindsay Zegans repped Kushner.
Spokespeople for Cornelia Street Partners and Ripco did not immediately respond to requests for comment, while Gentle Monster could not be reached for comment.
The asking rent was not disclosed, but retail asking rents along SoHo’s Prince Street averaged $1,409 per square foot in the third quarter of this year, according to CBRE data.
The 10-story Puck Building’s impending 35,000-square-foot vacancy was revealed last year, when REI announced it would depart Manhattan at the end of its 15-year lease. Closures were also announced in Boston and Paramus, N.J. The Seattle-based outdoor equipment company, which operates as a consumer cooperative, did not give an exact reason for its decision.
Postmortems by local outlets such as Curbed and the New York Times published amid the SoHo store’s July closure portrayed the store as a treasured urban oasis — a place where New Yorkers could grab discounted bike fenders, a sleeping bag for a spontaneous upstate trip, or just a few minutes of air-conditioned reprieve from Manhattan’s summer heat.
The next chapter of the Puck Building’s retail space comes with a compelling symmetry. REI began its tenancy at the corner of East Houston Street in 2011, the very same year Gentle Monster was founded in Seoul, South Korea.
Founder Hankook Kim pioneered the brand’s futuristic, avant-garde style of eyeglasses and sunglasses, the prices of which range from $250 to more than $500 for special collections. The brand operates 84 stores worldwide as of 2026, according to AJP, and is carried by hundreds of retailers.
Gentle Monster’s future neighbors among the Puck Building’s office floors above share a similar cachet. Sam Altman’s artificial intelligence giant OpenAI secured a major 90,000-square-foot lease at the building in 2024. The company’s arrival followed a 30,034-square-foot deal by U.K.-based hedge fund Quadrature, the portfolio of which is valued at a cool $11.7 billion.
Emily Davis can be reached at edavis@commercialobserver.com.
Disclosure: Joseph Meyer, the chairman of Commercial Observer owner Observer Media, is the husband of Nicole Kushner Meyer, a principal at Kushner.
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