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BLK MKT Vintage
When Kiyanna Stewart (far right) and Jannah Handy first met, vintage shopping was one of their favorite things to do as a couple. Yet they seldom saw pieces or dealers that represented their own lived experiences as Black women, a void they set out to fill. “We wanted to become the collectors that we wished we had access to when we first started out,” says Handy. Together they began to canvas the country for furnishings and ephemera with a connection to the African diaspora, from old issues of Jet magazine and posters from Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 presidential run to retro hair dryers (among them a 1950s baby-pink beauty scored at an estate sale). That hobby has since snowballed into a storefront in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn (where they both grew up), an e-commerce platform, a prop-rental business, and a design studio for sets and interiors. Since the pandemic hit, they’ve been focusing on online sales, but they’re gearing up to return to their store. Says Handy: “Access has been such a big thing for us, and a physical space helps with that.” blkmktvintage.com
Colony
“We operate more like a cooperative than a traditional gallery or showroom or store,” explains Jean Lin, who opened this Chinatown space in 2014. Her atypical business model asks that designers pay a monthly co-op fee and hand over only a small commission on transactions. “We hope designers can use this as a tool. That they can actually grow with their sales.” And they have. Fixtures on her limited roster (she currently reps just 14 studios) include Moving Mountains, Vonnegut/Kraft, Hiroko Takeda, and Meg Callahan, while newcomers include art-design firm A Space and lighting designer Bec Brittain, both based in New York. While Lin makes plenty of sales virtually, she hasn’t yet added e-commerce, favoring the physical experience of design hunting. “The retail landscape could easily look like a bunch of big-box stores,” she says, lamenting the city’s many recent closures. “As small businesses, we have to fight, support each other,
and survive.” goodcolony.com
Lichen
On Moore Street in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a stretch chockablock with butchers, barber shops, and bodegas, Jared Blake (near right) and Ed Be can be found selling Eames icons, classic Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designs for Knoll, and $3 cups of coffee. “It disarms people from feeling intimidated,” Blake says about their in-store café, a key component of the Lichen equation since they first opened in a former deli eight blocks away three years ago. (Their second location, a.k.a. Big Lichen, pictured, debuted last June.) Blake and Be conduct most of their business in person—though they do list items on Instagram—and urge visitors to touch or sit on the merch, even in the cases of rare finds like a Robert Venturi Chippendale chair or Piero Palange and Werther Toffoloni’s G23 Hoop lounge. Sourced from Craigslist (the two met on the platform when Blake sold Be a yellow Eames chair) or at auction, such pedigreed pieces mix right in with contemporary designs from the likes of Nigerian talent Nmbello Studio and Brooklyn ceramist Mariana Silva. Recently, Blake and Be have added designs of their own: a birch coffee table and a scaled-up version for dining. “It’s a crowdsourced table,” Blake explains of the simple silhouette, which was developed around frequent client requests. “You just don’t find these dimensions on Craigslist.” lichennyc.com
Tamam
When a shop owner in the East Village told Clare Louise Frost (far left) and Elizabeth
Hewitt about a great space nearby for rent, the designers thought about spreading the word. But after visiting the small storefront, these longtime friends, who first met while living in Istanbul, both uttered her sey tamam, a common Turkish phrase meaning something along the lines of “this is good.” So they signed the lease themselves, filling the skinny jewel box with things that also fit that description: textiles from Central Asia, Turkey, and Northwest India, a cache of antiques, dashing rugs by Turkish singer Zeki Müren, and their own line of ceramics (made in Turkey and inspired by 17th-century Ottoman motifs). Dealing in such items is nothing new for the duo or their third partner, Hüseyin Kaplan. Frost has an eponymous fabric line; Hewitt is behind the brand Tulu Textiles; and Kaplan owns two shops in Turkey. Still, they didn’t realize quite the impact a Manhattan boutique could have in terms of exposure. As Frost explains, “Even if people don’t walk in, its existence makes it real for people.” shop-tamam.com
The Somerset House
“This was a COVID baby,” says Alan Eckstein, a fashion designer, collector, and sometime decorator who opened shop in August after striking a deal on an empty storefront in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Blessed with 31-foot ceilings and a glass garage door that opens directly onto the sidewalk, the indoor/outdoor space was as perfect for the pandemic era as it was for housing Eckstein’s expansive collection of vintage and antique treasures. Inside, a 1990s postmodern chair by Eugenia Butler is stacked on a midcentury Paul McCobb side table. Nearby, a 1960s Vladimir Kagan sofa sits across from a 1982 Ettore Sottsass Callimaco floor lamp. “It’s so silly, it’s like a big bazooka,” Eckstein says of the Artemide light, which features a decorative handle. “But I wanted it next to a 19th-century sculpture and these Jean-Michel Frank chairs. I never really think about if things go together. If I like it, it works.” thesomersethouse.com
Coming Soon
After working together at a now-defunct design gallery in Chelsea, Fabiana Faria (above left)and
Helena Barquet wanted to open a store that felt fun, accessible, and a bit more democratic than the usual destinations. The couple had their eye on a specific spot: Orchard Street, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. “I wanted a little piece of New York,” recalls Faria. “And this was one of the last neighborhoods that still felt like New York.” They set up shop there in 2013, selling a fizzy mix of objects (Areaware puzzles, Gaetano Pesce trays and vases, Chen Chen & Kai Williams coasters, Boob bath mats by Cold Picnic) that has been bubbling ever since, attracting a cult following among aesthetes. In January 2017 they amped up their e-commerce (which thankfully got them through the worst months of the pandemic), and the following November, the then fiancées opened another showroom one street over for higher-end furnishings. This past October, they moved their main storefront down the block to the corner of Canal Street. Their new, roomier shop is filled with the same happy-go-lucky mix. Think a freshly reupholstered Milo Baughman loveseat, tons of giftable tabletop items, and a cache of retro wine coolers by Richard Carlson—a best seller in today’s era of perennial picnicking. comingsoonnewyork.com
Love House
Longtime friends and photographers Aric Yeakey (below right) and Jared Heinrich opened
this sun-bathed showroom in a Greenpoint, Brooklyn, warehouse two years ago, craving,
as Heinrich puts it, “a place that took things from different eras and made them work together, more of a living space than a store.” What started as a vintage-centric model has pivoted mid-pandemic to emphasize on-the-rise contemporary talents. Highlights include sculptural, hand-turned, wooden vessels by London-based Studio Anansi; dining suites made from regionally sourced timber by New York’s Gregory Beson; and hand-built ceramic seating by Texan Sunshine Thacker. Yeakey and Heinrich also started designing their own furniture, such as the sleek, customizable Downing Street table. But vintage pieces still shine, as evidenced by a 13-piece set of Mario Bellini’s 1970 Camaleonda sofa, among the largest such groupings in the world. “Some people don’t know what’s new or old,” says Yeakey. “I think that’s a testament to our style and the people we work with. It’s timeless design.” lovehouseny.com
Form Atelier
“It’s all about making connections,” says Avril Nolan, who founded this vintage and antiques business with her husband, Quy Nguyen, in 2017. At their new East Williamsburg showroom—they moved this past summer from a shoebox-size SoHo space—works from across time and place mingle in conversation. An 1880 Enfield shaker chair. A 1950s Berndt Petersen Egyptian stool. A rare Charlotte Perriand triangular Méribel stool. An 1820 rawhide Chinese stool. “All of these things are borrowing from each other,” explains Nguyen, by day the style director for Ralph Lauren Home. “The Danes brought back Shaker chairs to look at. Charlotte Perriand was inspired by rustic vernacular furniture using wood and rush. The Chinese were building forms so stripped down and modern that they look like cartoons.” These crosscultural links create the connective tissue between the many exquisite objects amassed in the shop, where a $400 1980s Formica table sits with a $14,000 17th-century Spanish painting. There’s even a sofa from CB2. But, as Nguyen points out, “it’s hard to pinpoint where things are from or what something costs. When you strip away money, value, names, and really study forms, it breaks down these barriers.” form-atelier.com
Bi-Rite Studio
In 2015, Cat Snodgrass quit her job at a record label to turn her side gig buying and selling postmodern design into a full-time job. Today, her signature cocktail of slick, curvy furniture and lighting has taken off. With a digital-forward format in addition to a Brooklyn shop, Snodgrass sidesteps the sometimes intimidating nature of the biz to reach clients (often young people new to buying) across the country. Like many dealers, she calls the pandemic “a crossroads moment” for her business. “Do we focus solely on the website? Are we a hybrid business? Do we stick to the brick-and-mortar format?” While most of her sales happen online, she opted to keep a street presence, building out a Bushwick warehouse space for eye-popping vintage gems like Ettore Sottsass’s Tahiti lamp and Archizoom Associati’s Superonda sofa, as well as new pieces from Kartell and her own designs, among them the wildly popular Capsule mirror. biritestudio.com
