Paloma Wool Shop, Pleated Wood Vases, and More

Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Courtesy of Allen Street Gallery, Demisch Danant and the artist; Belle Morizio/Courtesy Lyle Gallery; Michael Persico/Courtesy Conrad New York Downtown; Nicholas Calcott/Courtesy Mociun & Bower Studios

Warm-weather openings are here, including a rooftop bar inspired by the Amalfi Coast, which coincided with the design world converging at Salone in Milan. Paloma Wool finally opens a permanent home in Soho after eight years of pop-ups, and in a Chinatown apartment, designers from all over the world funnel their ideas of home into Lyle Gallery’s exhibition.

The rooftop bar Leonessa by Islyn Studio
Photo: Michael Persico/Courtesy Conrad New York Downtown

Ariel Arce, the restaurateur behind Tokyo Record Bar, Roscioli, and Heroes, is a partner and the cocktail chef at Leonessa, a new rooftop bar on the 16th floor of the Conrad New York Downtown. The bar takes most of its design cues from Italy, specifically the Amalfi Coast, complete with potted citrus trees. Islyn Studio, which designed the space, also had in mind “someone hosting friends in their private residence’s seaside garden,” and the bar seems made for sunset, when the geometric patterns and the sea-green, rose, and ocher hues covering the seating and walls seem to vibrate in the golden light. On a practical level, the biggest challenge was finding wind-, rain-, freeze-, and thawproof furniture without diluting the alfresco, coastal feeling. Open Tuesday to Saturday.

At the Battery Park rooftop, Pietro Fornasetti and custom Dedar cushions are some of the many retro prints layered through the bar.
Photo: Michael Persico/Courtesy Conrad New York Downtown

Sculptural clothing racks made from raw stainless steel and cloudy sanded acrylic sheets are part installation part fixture.
Photo: Fyodor Shiryaev/Courtesy Paloma Wool

Before opening its New York store, Paloma Wool dipped into the city eight times as part of the Spanish brand’s global “world tours.” If you stood on line for its Soho pop-up in the past three years, the Broome Street location will be familiar. A local and international crew of past collaborators appears in this latest, less provisional iteration: Artist Max Milà Serra leads the store design, production, and lighting, working with designer-welder Mark Malecki, who left Brooklyn to assist Serra in his Barcelona workshop. Together they created shop furnishings of welded steel and natural wood, including minimalist wood platforms retrofitted with plexiglass boxes to display mother-of-pearl necklaces and sandwiched metal shelves that hang from thin wires, presenting bags and single shoes. But perhaps the standout features are the two sculptural steel fixtures bolted with translucent acrylic sheets that arc around the center of the 3,000-square-foot store; hand-sanded acrylic obscures the clothing from one side and envelops shoppers on the other. On the edges of the space, the changing room’s curved, untreated timber shell makes an unbroken ripple and creates private nooks. Throughout the store, tiny modular, aerospace-inspired lights designed by Serra dangle from fine overlapping cables, spotlighting the space without overwhelming it.

425 Broome Street is Paloma Wool’s first permanent store, with design led by Max Milà Serra.
Photo: Fyodor Shiryaev/Courtesy Paloma Wool

Photo: Fyodor Shiryaev/Courtesy Paloma Wool

Photo: Nicholas Calcott/Courtesy Mociun & Bower Studios

Jewelry designer and shopkeeper Caitlin Mociun along with her husband, Tammer Hijazi, a furniture and lighting designer, have brought their work together under one roof on Driggs Avenue. It’s a familiar location: the storefront home of Mociun for eight years. Now it’s also the first store of Bower Studios, a contemporary mirror and furniture company Hijazi co-founded with Danny Giannella. Creating their joint shop, Mociun and Hijazi welcomed the opportunity to shift away from its previous all-white, stark look, bringing desaturated gem tones, a range of textures, and a vintage Italian sensibility into the space. Purple carpeting, green walls, and ribbed-glass bricks are the backdrop to Bower Studios’ walnut wood and Maharam textile chairs. Small details from the furniture were also reproduced in some details of the store, like an encased wood-and-metal bookshelf that replicates the double fluted wood seen in the new collection. A glass-brick wall was extended through the space that Mociun described as “essentially a box,” entertaining waiting clients on one side, while consultations take place on the other. Tucked into the olive-green wall, a beveled-glass walnut case showcases jewelry that ranges from diamond-encrusted pizza charms to carved-moonstone signet rings. By appointment only.

Racing to minimize the days spent closed, the store overhaul was completed in just eleven days.
Photo: Nicholas Calcott/Courtesy Mociun & Bower Studios

A painting by Robin F. Williams looks over Bower Studios’ new collection of double fluted wood furniture.
Photo: Nicholas Calcott/Courtesy Mociun & Bower Studios

Sophie Collé’s “Just For Fun” is an amalgam of her favorite architectural fantasies.
Photo: Belle Morizio/Courtesy Lyle Gallery

There have already been a fair number of apartment-based shows this spring, but the first-floor Chinatown apartment that hosts “Gathered,” with floor-to-ceiling crimson drapes, makes a modest space feel grand. Thirty-two artists and designers contributed objects on the theme of home, culled from an open call that drew more than 350 responses. It’s a collaboration between Erria, an online platform founded by Alyssa Gerasimoff, who wanted to help fellow designers and RISD graduates find an audience for their work, and Lyle Gallery, a gallery focused on emerging talent, which Lin and Magdalena Tyrpien opened last spring in a space they found on Craigslist. In homage to the fairy-tale mushroom, Jihyun Kim offers a deceitfully squishy-looking ceramic one inspired by a jar of salt her Korean grandmother kept by the front door to fend off negative energy. Nodding to home as a place where you run amok in your underwear, Kritika Manchanda flattened bloomers into a holographic organza dinner napkin. And Didi NG Wing Yin, who was just announced as a Loewe Craft Prize finalist, does something remarkable to wood, giving the ombré green vase a pleated texture not unlike an Issey Miyake top. Finally, the always playful New York–based designer Sophie Collé enters the world of miniatures with a Memphis-inspired dollhouse-clock. Closes April 20.

Lyle Gallery co-founder Lin Tyrpie (front) and Erria founder Alyssa Gerasim met while participating at last year’s Collectible Design fair in New York.
Photo: Belle Morizio/Courtesy Lyle Gallery

Originally from Hong Kong, Didi NG Wing Yin is now based in Helsinki. The wood artist’s “Pleats Vase” was inspired by the surface of split firewood.
Photo: Belle Morizio/Courtesy Lyle Gallery

“Salty Fairy Vessel” is Jihyun Kim’s  merges her intrigue for mythical fairy rings and recalls a cherished tradition from her grandmother.
Photo: Belle Morizio/Courtesy Lyle Gallery

Studio S II’s ‘Chastity Sconce” encloses rippled glass in a cage of stainless steel.
Photo: Courtesy of Allen Street Gallery and the artist

A well-designed wall sconce can almost stand in for a work of art. This idea is on display at Allen Street Gallery, the storefront space of Leroy Street Studio. Its show, “Jewel Box,” not only ventures far and wide in material and technique but also in the range of exhibitors: French stainless-steel pioneer Maria Pergay, perennial material experimenters Chen Chen and Kai Williams, and emerging talent like Elana Shvalbe. Katie Stout offers a gold-glazed porcelain ceramic tusk. Lebanese architect Zein Daouk’s ceramic sconce is a gracefully warped homage to the shiitake mushroom. Made in 1956, Max Ingrand’s oblong-shaped frosted glass lights bear the closest resemblance to jewels, clasped in brass hardware. Opens April 17.

Chen Chen and Kai’s “Geffen Petal Sconce” was derived from the custom chandelier commissioned for David Geffen Hall in Lincoln Center.
Photo: Courtesy of Allen Street Gallery and the artist

A porcelain and gold sconce made by Katie Stout (2019).
Photo: Courtesy of Allen Street Gallery, R & Company and the artist

Beirut-based Zein Daouk was an architect before venturing into ceramics. The sconce here is “Shining Shiitake.”
Photo: Courtesy of Allen Street Gallery, Galerie Gabriel and the artist