“Just don’t call us publishers; we are a luxury brand,” said Alex Assouline, who manages sales and marketing at the company’s New York headquarters, pointing out that the company has lately ventured into podcasting, (the “Culture Lounge Podcast”) and has produced a digital magazine. Another element of their business is curating libraries for corporate and private clients, furnishing them with Assouline-branded products.

The privately held company, in which LVMH holds a minority stake, celebrates its 30th anniversary this month. Though the family declines to share the particulars of revenues or volume, it says Assouline is profitable.

‘No discounts, no overruns’

In the decades since its founding in 1994, the brand has borrowed the codes of luxury fashion, holding out for choice retail real estate: Its 30 stores-within-stores throughout Europe occupy ground-floor selling space. The company also acts as its own distributor, a strategy to maintain scarcity and an image of exclusivity. “There will be no discounts, no overruns,” Alex Assouline said.

Assouline operates 18 freestanding stores worldwide, including Maison Assouline, its gilded London flagship, and a second flagship set to open next month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, spanning 10,000 square feet that includes an upscale restaurant. It also occupies boutique spaces in hotels like the Plaza Athénée in Paris and the Peninsula in Hong Kong.

The brand’s latest outpost, an independent boutique on Madison Avenue at 62nd Street in New York, shares a city block with Kiton, Hermès and John Lobb, and accommodates a small bar and outdoor cafe. Its interior, a colourful but somewhat austere amalgam of marble-top consoles, Persian carpeting, and statuary and towering bookcases, does not invite casual browsing.

Its shelves are pristinely arrayed with books from the company’s popular travel series — Miami, Provence and Dubai, among others — and the small, relatively affordable monographs on Dior, Alaia and other household fashion names on which the brand built its early success.

Those shelves groan as well with special editions like Rare Cars: The World’s Most Exclusive Rides; Golf, housed in a golf ball textured metal clamshell; and Chanel, the Impossible Collection ($US1050).

A customer hoping to examine one of these rarefied objects is promptly greeted by an attendant who heaves it from its resting place and offers a pair of white cotton gloves with which to leaf through its contents, a practice in keeping with the brand’s mission.

“We are not just about commercial success,” Alex Assouline said. “We bring artistry and intellect to shopping.”

An exalted claim for sure, but one in tune with perceived consumer appetites. Illustrated books, publishers’ preferred term for the kinds of coffee table volumes often displayed in the offices of doctors, wealth management firms and corporate libraries, are “cultural eye candy,” said Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Luxury Institute, a New York-based consumer research and consulting firm. They confer on “connoisseurs, or would-be connoisseurs, a whiff of prestige,” he said.

Among the stores’ most successful volumes are Assouline travel books, purchased as souvenirs and acting as catnip on armchair travellers. “These people want to be part of the world, whether it’s the Sistine Chapel or the Louvre or Versailles,” Kaplan said. Assouline limited editions, including a $US1200 tome on motorcycles, remain popular, he added. “People are buying them as design elements for their homes.”

Well apprised of this growing trend, associated with the notion of shelf wealth, Assouline is intent on expanding its library services and on making incursions into the lifestyle arena, such as home fragrances and pricey bibelots.

The company — whose wares included home fragrances and which has curated libraries for corporate clients, including the condominium complex at 277 Fifth Avenue and the Caledonia, a luxury apartment building in the Chelsea neighbourhood of Manhattan — plans to provide a similar service for private collectors. “We will curate and design not just your bookcase but, working with contractors, your carpet and your office table,” Alex Assouline said, adding assertively, “We are an interior designer.”

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But some say not so fast. As Pedraza of the Luxury Institute noted, “It remains to be seen how interior design fits with the brand’s ethos and ambitions. Furniture is a crowded space, with formidable risks, production and logistics among them. For Assouline, this is a Hail Mary pass.”

Such cautions are unlikely to dissuade the younger Assouline. “We want to package culture where culture meets luxury,” he said. “A well-appointed library is part of that.”

Hubris or brashly canny marketing? Assouline evades such distinctions. “In this sphere,” he declared, “we aim to become the authority.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.