NEW YORK CITY—Dolce & Gabbana's flagship retail store will take over the former home of dance performance venue the Joyce Theater in Soho. Thor Equities said Tuesday that the design house had leased the entirety of its 15,000-square-foot building at 155 Mercer St.

“As a leading luxury design house and fashion forward brand, Dolce & Gabbana is an ideal fit for the increasingly trendy Mercer Street corridor and surrounding SoHo neighborhood,” says Joseph Sitt, CEO of Thor Equities. The new store's retail neighbors include Marc Jacobs, Zadig & Voltaire, and Yves Saint Laurent. Directly across the street from 155 Mercer are Vera Wang, Versace and Balenciaga, among others.

Originally built in 1855 as Firemen's Hall, the historical property was most recently home to the Joyce Theater, now located at 175 Eighth Ave.  Dolce & Gabbana, which opened what was then a manhattan flagship two years ago at 717 Fifth Ave., plans to recreate 155 Mercer's original brownstone façade. The four-level building includes 50 feet of frontage on Mercer Street.

While Soho's rents for ground-floor retail are a fraction of what owners charge along the Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue corridors, they're among the highest outside those corridors. Median asking rents for the Soho submarket were $819 per square foot according to the most recent Retail Report from the Real Estate Board of New York.