New York Design Week 2019 went out on a high note with the opening of Egg Collective’s new Manhattan showroom on the last official day of the event. Located on a sun-drenched, ground floor corner of a historic 1893 building in Tribeca, Egg Collective’s new digs notably comes with a glassy storefront, which services the female-fronted firm’s objective of being more accessible to both clients and visitors.
‘When we took over the lease, the prior tenants here was a corporate law office, so it required a good deal of imagination. It was really chopped up into smaller offices and had some dropped ceilings, questionable carpets and those kinds of things,’ says Crystal Ellis, who co-founded Egg Collective with partners Stephanie Beamer and Hillary Petrie back in 2011.
‘We did a full gut of the space and reimagined the floor plan and all the finishes,’ adds Beamer. ‘We’re trained as architects, so we’ve always acted as the designers on our own spaces.’
The furniture firm has only ever designed interiors for themselves or family members up until now, and remains steadfastly focused on developing product collections, despite undertaking the showroom concept. The result is a transformation of the 2,000 sq ft, column-free space into two large showrooms. These sit on either end of the space, flanking a pair of smaller, more intimate vignette spaces, which invite visitors to slow their down once they enter and meander through the rooms.
An arching gauzy curtain by the entrance creates curvilinear partitions, while dropped ceilings in the trio’s shared office embed an organic feel in the rooms. Elsewhere, angular doorways, which are staggered to create that experience of meandering through, give the appearance of layered geometric forms. Both of these aspects also carry through in Egg Collective’s newest furniture pieces, which the trio designed at the same time as the showroom.
‘This collection was conceived while we were building out the space. It has a lot of resonance with the showroom because they were informing each other,’ says Beamer. ‘There are architectural details in the space that resulted in furniture decisions and vice versa. They have a unified language.’
Ranging from a sectional sofa and a low bookcase, to a large coffee table and the Martie desk (named after Petrie’s infant daughter) that was specially designed for the trio to use in their office, the new designs feature interlocking geometry and intersecting planes.
‘The pieces all have a language that we’ve developed for this collection – three forms that are popping up, rotating or intersecting in the planes that they are coming into contact with,’ explains Ellis. There are also new iterations on existing designs – a club chair version of the Howard sofa, as well as both heights of the Isla coffee table, which are displayed in the showroom in newly available nesting styles.
‘We’re trained as architects, so we’ve always acted as the designers on our own spaces.’
The new space also provided an excuse for the trio to bring several collaborative ideas to fruition. On the walls, a new surface treatment collection by Callidus Guild called ‘Matte’, is exclusively available through Egg Collective. Wonderfully textured thanks to layers of marble aggregating in different sizes suspended in lime, the two ‘Matte’ finishes are designed to evoke the weatherworn exteriors of buildings sat along the Mediterranean Sea. They are also naturally pigmented, breathable and low VOC, as with all of Callidus Guild’s work, which makes them healthy to use as they naturally purify the air.
Another longtime collaboration with the textile artist Hiroko Takeda, who has created exclusive upholstery fabrics for Egg Collective – a boucle and a basket weave, both in wool – is also now available.
The space’s final flourish comes in the form of Egg Collective’s expanded art program to showcase and support the creative work of others. Its inaugural group show entitled ‘Material Matters’, curated by photographer Tealia Ellis Ritter, presents artworks from Mimi Jung, Kristina Riska, Matthew King, Stephen Somple and Ritter throughout the new space.
INFORMATION
For more information, visit the Egg Collective website
ADDRESS
Egg Collective
151 Hudson Street
New York
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