New York’s Met Exhibits Artistic Designs on O.C. : Art: Famed Metropolitan Museum chooses the South Coast Plaza for its first retail outlet in the West. The store will feature reproductions, prints, books, crystal and other art items.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is coming to Orange County--sort of.

The world-renowned museum, known widely as the Met, said Tuesday that it would open its first retail store on the West Coast this fall at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa.

The store will offer the museum’s extensive selection of reproductions of original works, as well as art books, prints, posters, sculptures, porcelain, crystal and other artistic items.

“It’s not East Coast culture we represent, it’s the culture of the world,” said Pat Brugger, manager of store planning for the museum, explaining why the museum was opening an outlet in Orange County.

She noted that the museum has more than 2 million works of art, spanning more than 5,000 years from prehistory to the present and representing the achievements of every major civilization.

All revenue from the stores support the museum itself and its public exhibitions, Brugger said.

Jim Henwood, manager of South Coast Plaza, said that attracting the Met was a coup. “Bringing one of the greatest art museums in the world to South Coast Plaza is a natural extension of our ongoing campaign of always seeking the best,” he said.

Attracting upscale retailers is part of a long-range plan announced in February to renovate the 23-year-old regional mall, the largest in terms of sales in the West. By year end, over 50 new stores will have opened or been renovated at South Coast Plaza, Henwood said.

The Met has three stores in Manhattan: at the Cloisters in upper Manhattan; on 5th Avenue in partnership with the New York Public Library; and in Macy’s department store in Herald Square. Brugger said the museum will open a fourth Manhattan store in the fall in Rockefeller Center, before the opening at South Coast Plaza.

In late 1987, the museum branched out from its New York base, opening a retail store at the Stamford Town Center mall in Stamford, Conn. Subsequent retail outlets were opened in West Farms Mall in Hartford, Conn., the Mall at Short Hills in New Jersey, and last summer at Columbus City Center in Columbus, Ohio.

Brugger said the response to the retail stores has been good. “Once we moved from the museum, whether it be Columbus, Ohio, or California, the logistics were the same,” she said.

She said the museum has numerous members in Southern California who support the Met, and who receive the gift catalogue that is sent out several times a year. She said the retail store will carry essentially the same items featured in the catalogue.

Brugger said the store will carry commemorative posters of the New York exhibits. In addition to reproductions of original works, it will sell silver, jewelry, scarfs, ties, shawls, umbrellas, needlework, greeting cards, videocassettes and children’s toys and books.

The items are unusual.

One of the most popular pieces, Brugger said, is a pair of earrings modeled on the painting “Venus Before the Mirror” by Peter Paul Rubens. Venus is pictured adjusting a white pearl earring in the mirror, which reflects it as a smoky color. Brugger said customers can purchase one white and one smoky earring, reminiscent of the painting.

Another example is the glassware and decanters which are made using 19th-Century techniques to imitate the American baroque revival style. The style is attributed to the Boston & Sandwich Glass Company of New England, which made the items from 1820 to 1840.

The museum store will lease 3,300 square feet of space on the first level between Jewel and Carousel courts, Plaza officials said, between the Back Bay Rowing Company and Bally of Switzerland. It will replace Company’s Coming, a family-run china, porcelain and crystal shop that is going out of business, Henwood said.

South Coast Plaza currently includes the Circle Gallery, Upstairs Gallery, The Works Gallery South, and the Laguna Art Museum Satellite at South Coast Plaza, a gallery space and museum store. It also holds the Rizzoli International Bookstore & Gallery, which sells museum-quality art and photography books.

Nancy Coop, a spokeswoman for the Laguna Art Museum, which focuses on California artists, said she welcomes the new Met store. “Our feeling is the more arts environments there are, the better,” she said. “It’s a healthy environment.”

Henwood said there are no plans at present for more art-type stores or galleries in the Plaza, which has been adding more glitzy, Rodeo Drive-style retailers, while scratching out some of the smaller, less profitable names from its directory. Out are Lynn’s Hallmark, Century Stationers, the Pottery Barn and the like. In are Calvin Klein, Liz Claiborne, Chanel and F.A.O. Schwarz.

In all, 150,000 square feet of South Coast’s 2.6-million square feet of retail space will be involved in an interior remodeling and store shuffling, the most extensive face-lift, excluding expansions, in the mall’s history. The changes involve the original South Coast Plaza, the Crystal Court annex and South Coast Village, across Sunflower Avenue.

Henwood bristled at the comparison with Rodeo Drive.

“While it’s a compliment to be compared with other worldwide retail destinations,” he said, “we don’t perceive ourselves as being Rodeo Drive South. We perceive ourselves as being one of the finest retail areas in the country in our own right.”