Luxury British cocoa grower and chocolatier, Hotel Chocolat, has chosen Hammerson's Dundrum Town Centre to open its first cafe store in Ireland.
The new, 102 sq m café store at Dundrum marks an all-important first for Hotel Chocolat in the Irish market, and will offer the centre’s shoppers its full range of exclusive chocolates as well as the brand’s own café, which will feature innovative new cocoa-based drinks including their signature Hot Chocolat and Coffee Chocolat Lattes.
Due to open in October of this year, the new Hotel Chocolat store will trade next to Zara and Hugo Boss.
Hotel Chocolat was founded in 2003 to make exciting chocolate with three guiding principles – authenticity, originality and ethics – that remain central to the brand’s success today.
With its Rabot Estate cocoa plantation and Boucan Hotel & Restaurant in Saint Lucia, a chocolate-manufacturing facility in Cambridgeshire and stores and cocoa cafés across the UK and internationally, Hotel Chocolat occupies a unique space – being able to link all aspects of chocolate from the tree to the consumer.
The addition of Hotel Chocolat to Dundrum follows a number of firsts for the centre, which include Smiggle’s debut store in the country and its most successful opening globally, as well as Volvo, which chose the venue to unveil its latest model for the first time in Ireland. This summer, Hammerson brought Diarmuid Gavin’s ‘Garden of Pure Imagination’ to Dundrum, a unique and innovative feature that has achieved critical acclaim.
Peter Harris, Co-Founder, Hotel Chocolat, said, “We are hugely excited to be expanding into Ireland. It took us a while to find the perfect location for our first café here but we feel confident that we have found it in Dundrum. We want our new café and store to offer a real sense of escapism the moment you step inside.”
Simon Betty, Director of Retail for Ireland at Hammerson, said, “Hotel Chocolat is a perfect fit for Dundrum, where it will trade alongside other premium brands. The centre is Ireland’s leading retail and leisure destination, making it the ideal venue for the brand to launch in the growing Irish market.
'Since taking ownership of Dundrum last year, we have worked to leverage our relationships with domestic and international brands in order to ensure an exciting and fresh retail mix, and this latest debut is testament to the success of that strategy.”
