Best of Year: Showroom

Deborah Wilk and Annie Block -- Interior Design, 12/1/2010 11:39:00 AM

Project: Avenue Road
Firm: Yabu Pushelberg
Location: Toronto

How do you showcase a range of furniture, lighting, and textiles by global luminaries from Eileen Gray to Konstantin Grcic—being all things to all potential customers while still reflecting a unique retail program? George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg’s solution is a gallerylike setting with simple symmetry. They inserted a long skylight right down the middle of the three-story redbrick structure, the former Consumers’ Gas Company built in 1852. Vignettes hug the perimeter, and blackened steel frames accessory-display cases that appear to float along the sides of the central atrium. On the lower level, a glass-fronted conference room is furnished with Helmut Jahn and Yorgo Lykouria’s table and Jorge Zalszupin’s chairs. Staff members spend most of the time, however, in the serene open office found at the back of the top level, tucked beneath original ceiling trusses.


Project: Flavor Paper
Firm: SkyLab Architecture
Location: Brooklyn

When Jon Sherman decided to move Flavor Paper from New Orleans to Brooklyn, New York, he called principal Jeff Kovel. The chosen site was a 1931 brick garage encompassing 19,000 square feet. In addition to improving the manufacturing conditions, the new headquarters was to act as the supreme marketing vehicle. “Everywhere we could, we three-dimensionalized Flavor Paper and pattern in general,” Kovel says. A ground-level studio allows passersby to view the manufacturing process. Level two is the lounge-y showroom, where wallpaper is displayed like artwork in huge polished-aluminum spinning racks. Kovel abstracted one particular pattern for the inlays in the terrazzo, and another pattern inspired the round ceiling coves and the serpentine banquette. The building-as-marketing-tool strategy is perhaps best executed by the former car lift. Its three windows frame highly visible pink and purple neon blow-up versions of a Flavor Paper floral, which seems to ascend the 58-foot-high shaft like an electric vine.

Merit Winners:


Project: Yong Nian
Firm: Kris Lin Interior Design
Location: Xiamen, China
Standout: Origami inspired this real-estate developer’s showroom for a residential complex


Project: Haworth
Firm: Clive Wilkinson Architects
Location: Chicago
Standout: Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec’s Clouds are cool blue, while panel systems, columns, and ottomans flaunt red, pink, and orange.