The design world across the city — SoHo and Tribeca’s guild houses, the Village’s ateliers, Chelsea, the Upper East Side’s trade floors, and Brooklyn’s studios.
With the compliments of the concierge desk
Hours rotate and showrooms occasionally move; a moment’s confirmation before you set out is always worthwhile. Many welcome visitors directly; others serve the design trade, and our concierge desk is glad to call ahead or arrange an introduction.
The cast-iron blocks where a showroom can be a way of life.
The retail world of architect-designers Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch, whose firm shaped the Ace Hotel, Le Coucou, and the Met’s British Galleries. Part home shop, part flower market, part French café — La Mercerie — it gathers the firm’s own furniture and lighting alongside artisan works chosen for natural materials and heritage craft.
Tyler Hays’s sprawling, white-washed loft on Crosby Street, where heirloom-quality furniture in solid American hardwoods is joined by hand and finished in hand-rubbed oils — the workshop itself is across the river in Williamsburg. Each floor has its own mood, and the ceramics and brass mirrors have a quiet cult following.
Downtown’s collectible-design heart — former textile lofts turned serene galleries, clustered within a few walkable blocks.
For nearly thirty years, Zesty Meyers and Evan Snyderman have championed collectible design — rediscovering overlooked twentieth-century masters while backing living talents like the Haas Brothers and Katie Stout. Their flagship fills an 1869 cast-iron landmark on White Street, with a second space a few doors away on Franklin.
The women-founded studio of Stephanie Beamer, Crystal Ellis, and Hillary Petrie — all trained as architects — shows its handcrafted furniture in a sunlit corner of an 1893 building, arranged like the rooms of a home rather than a white box, with a rotating program of works by contemporary artists alongside.
Nacho Polo and Robert Onuska brought their Miami gallery north into a 7,000-square-foot former textile building at Church and Leonard — all curved plaster walls, archways, and a chestnut library concealed behind discreet doors. The presentation is staged as a full sensory experience, by appointment, so you have it to yourself.
A West Village townhouse gallery, an East Village institution, and the antiques-and-design row of East 10th Street.
David Alhadeff’s gallery has grown from a scrappy Williamsburg shop into one of the most influential names in collectible design. Its New York home is a five-story West Village townhouse with a David Chipperfield staircase and a garden, where contemporary pieces are shown in lived-in rooms. Appointment only — and worth the small ceremony.
The découpage artist’s adjoining East Village storefronts are a downtown institution — a magpie’s paradise of his signature decoupage plates and glass, antique furniture, Astier de Villatte ceramics, and Hugo Guinness prints. The Dry Goods shop next door adds textiles and linens.
Founded in 1974 by Gerardus Widdershoven — the first dealer to open on what is now East 10th Street’s antiques row — Maison Gerard was New York’s pioneering source for fine French Art Deco. Across two adjoining storefronts, period masterworks sit comfortably beside commissions from living designers, a juxtaposition the gallery helped make fashionable.
Kim Hostler and Juliet Burrows built their name on early-twentieth-century Scandinavian design and a peerless eye for studio ceramics, particularly by women artists. Since settling on East 10th Street they have woven a roster of contemporary makers through the historical holdings — cutting-edge work that keeps faith with the past.
Where art and high-end design share a single museum-lit floor.
A third-generation family business that began making mannequins in the 1950s and, after representing Andrée Putman’s furniture in 1989, became one of New York’s most influential design galleries. Sculptural in-house collections are still made in the Manhattan headquarters upstairs; the gallery treats furniture and art with equal seriousness, and its jazz nights and artist talks turn a visit into an event.
The trade’s heartland — landmark townhouses and design buildings above 60th Street.
The center of gravity for American interior design since 1965: eighteen floors and more than a hundred showrooms of the world’s leading fabric, wallpaper, furniture, and lighting houses. The showrooms serve the trade, but the lobby’s Assouline bookstore welcomes everyone, and the building’s consulting program — or a word from our desk — can open the doors for a serious project.
The New York home of a Paris-born platform for collectible design, set in a serene townhouse just off Madison Avenue. Alongside pieces from a roster of contemporary design stars, it has unveiled the revived Jacques Doucet legacy collection and collaborations with Chanel’s Maisons d’Art — staged like a collector’s residence rather than a shop.
A 1901 building near the D&D that quietly houses some of the most respected names in the field under one roof — decorative-arts champion Liz O’Brien on the ground floor, the antiques institution Newel, Bunny Williams Home, Doris Leslie Blau’s carpets, and Lucca Antiques among them. A single elevator ride is a tour of the trade’s upper echelon.
One of the world’s foremost dealers in seventeenth- through nineteenth-century British and Continental furniture, with a particular love of architect-designed pieces and aristocratic provenance, shown in a landmark Carnegie Hill townhouse. By appointment — and worth every formality.
Designer-run shops and studios, from the brownstones of Brooklyn Heights to East Williamsburg.
Mauri Weakley and Laura Rucker’s beloved, color-saturated home shop began in Ditmas Park and now anchors lower Atlantic Avenue, with an interior-design studio and showroom around the corner on Henry Street. Expect joyful vignettes — bold textiles, original art, select furniture — and a full design practice behind it all.
Jared Blake and Ed Be founded Lichen in 2017 to democratize good design, mixing affordable vintage finds with their own contemporary pieces in an East Williamsburg space that doubles as a design incubator and gathering spot. A refreshing, unpretentious counterpoint to the downtown galleries.