Designer Shops, Modern Heirlooms, and Haute Equipment — Field Notes From Our NYC Editor for April

As the industry readies itself for Milan Design Week — when everything skews toward the newest and brightest designs set to shape the year ahead — the past month has felt slightly more reflective, at least for me. Something old, something new: that’s the loose theme that surfaced as I pieced together my outings, a kind of balancing act.

A new shop opened that you’re bound to love, while an old favorite quietly closed; more than one product launch felt both antique and contemporary at once, refusing to pick sides.

Here’s a snapshot of what I saw over the past few weeks.

Opening Night

Retail is in Robert Stilin’s DNA. The New York interior designer opened his first shop in Palm Beach in the 1990s, later adding an outpost in the Hamptons. He'd left both behind, which makes his new space in NoMad, simply named Robert Stilin Shop, something of a return to form. It’s also a practical move: I recently walked through his studio, just next door, and it’s a labyrinth of furniture and objects Stilin has sourced from around the world that haven’t yet found a home in a project. It’s beautifully orchestrated chaos, of course—no surface spared from stacks (and stacks) of reference books, raw materials, and samples from projects spanning the Hamptons to Mallorca.

The shop, naturally, is a place to funnel those finds, while offering clients (but also fans who don't have the occasion for a full-house renovation) a taste of his signature atmosphere. To that end, the space is arranged like an apartment. You'll find restored vintage pieces alongside an edit of customizable staples, as well as more personal items — art from his own collection, or a round wooden table that once sat in his Hamptons home. If you do visit, have a seat in his Seccia Chair, a signature form he’s reupholstered endlessly across projects and featured heavily throughout the pages of his latest monograph, New Work — it’s as comfortable as it looks.

Room Crush

And you know what they say—when one door opens, another closes. That’s the case for one of my personal favorites, the SoHo showroom of BDDW, which recently announced it will close at the end of the month. (If you don’t know the name, you’ll likely recognize the iconic puzzle paintings or their signature armchairs.) It’s a bittersweet farewell, especially given the showroom itself: a shockingly large space for a cult furniture brand, with soaring ceilings that felt almost like a temple to American craft.

Its history is part of the charm. As founder Tyler Hays recently shared in the announcement, the shop opened just after 9/11 and barely sold anything in its early years; now, some 25 years later, with plenty of success, rent in SoHo has climbed to an eye-watering $100,000 a month. Not that this is a full goodbye — the brand’s Philadelphia and Los Angeles showrooms remain fully open — but its absence will be felt. I’ll miss its high-craft, low-key presence in the city, not to mention the annual parties, where hot dogs were served alongside furniture of the highest order.

That spirit of discovery carried through to the work itself, which brings me to the room pictured above, the design I'm currently crushing on at the moment. It comes from Idaho- and California-based Studio Mountain, whose founder visited BDDW's Manhattan showroom and stumbled across 82 hand-painted amber tiles tucked inside a drawer — leftovers from a previous installation — during a sourcing trip with a client back in 2021. They didn't exactly have anywhere to place them, but they bought them on the spot anyway, later designing an entire powder room backsplash around the set. It’s the kind of story the showroom seemed to encourage: even if you didn't have space for one of their designs, you might end up designing a whole project around it anyway.

Collab Watch

Image 1 of 4

The phrase “modern heirlooms” is percolating at the moment—a shorthand for brand-new products that aim to outlast the trend cycle, perhaps long enough to be passed down a generation or two. It’s the guiding principle behind a recent collaboration between Zara Home and New York designer and stylist Colin King: a collection of vessels, lighting, and sculptural pieces designed with permanence in mind. King leans on old-world materials to reinforce the idea — brass and bronze, glass and onyx — giving weight to simple silhouettes and instilling a sense of quiet timelessness throughout.

That’s perhaps most evident in pieces like the iridescent glass vases, where small irregularities from their hand-blown nature (a slight wobble along the lip, say) become part of the charm, or in brass plates with subtly uneven proportions that feel gently worn. My personal favorite, though, are the woven brass baskets — objects that read as both old and new, and slip easily into interiors that straddle eras. Will the collection last? Time will tell.

Style Note

My ears popped as I rode the elevator to the top of The Greenwich, an 88-story residential tower in FiDi, where the toasty penthouse was somehow blazing with sunset — especially compared to the chilly, shaded streets below. I was there to see a new colorway introduced by Technogym, a status fitness brand that's no stranger to elevated equipment. Treadmills and elliptical machines were showcased in the brand's new ‘Sand’ finish throughout the model penthouse — and, perched so close to the sun, they were all getting their best possible light.

It's part of a growing shift in fitness equipment, an industry long dominated by blacks, chromes, and other hard-wearing tones. The 'sand' launch is part of a broader push toward interior-minded finishes in gym equipment — even wood grains have shown up in dumbbells that could arguably double as decor — that are shifting away from the tougher palettes we're used to seeing in gym equipment. The colorway already rolled out in Europe and is set to launch in the US soon. It’s unlikely to make a major splash in the average home — the price point is too steep for that — but it’s easy to imagine softer, certainly prettier finishes making their way to accessible equipment — equipment you're happy to show off, and now shove into the basement corner.

Insider Pick

It was a dreary, rainy morning when I previewed the upcoming collaboration between fabric brand Zoffany and interior designer Michael S. Smith–fitting, considering the indoor-outdoor nature of the collection. There are plenty of reasons to find the series attractive, which draws heavily on both Zoffany’s and Smith’s archives. But the detail I found most promising was Smith’s commitment to creating a performance fabric with the look and feel of a traditional interior textile. “It was really hard for me to get anything that sort of had the quality of a beautiful antique print,” said Smith, nodding to the technical element that underpins the series.

Solids and graphic patterns have come so far in the world of performance fabrics, to the point that many designers I speak with often use them indoors for reasons you might expect (dogs, children, peace of mind), but patterns that lean into antiquity tend to read more artificial. For a more authentic look, Zoffany introduced print marks and ink bleeds to bring the printed effect closer to a traditional construction – and it does look convincing across patterns from stripes to botanicals.