In New York’s Gramercy Park neighborhood Maharam’s new showroom offers a serene sanctum with its airy historic renovation and a pleasing gridded motif. The textile manufacturer’s new 3,500-square-foot space, which also includes textiles from Edelman and Knoll Textiles, offers a grandiose remix of the elegant, sparse design vocabulary that is threaded throughout all of Maharam’s outlets. Colorful textile sample squares ranging from nubby tweeds to delicately patterned vinyl and butter-soft leather are framed artfully by the warm grain of solid fir and marine plywood displays.
The fabric giant’s distinctive spatial style has been fine-tuned and perfected across the better part of two decades by the architect Neil Logan. Logan, who has since applied his understated, wood-forward sensibility to projects that span suspended Supreme skate bowls and white-cube galleries, was first approached by Michael and Stephen Maharam to design their Chicago showroom in 2000. “It was a process of getting to know what I was interested in doing and what they were interested in doing,” Logan told AN Interior about the partnership. “Over a long period of time, over years and years, we gradually came into a whole rhythm and developed a kind of vocabulary for what would be in these showrooms.”
After the brothers took over the company in 1997, they had set their sights on a complete overhaul to bring the family business into the 21st century. Central to their vision was the transformation of retail spaces to reflect their own interests in contemporary art and design, a departure from the company’s 1902 origins as a pushcart hawking cloth remnants in the Lower East Side.
The first step to doing so was to eliminate the overwhelming amounts of material involved in textile shopping, paring down the unwieldy bolts of fabric to a more human scale. “We decided that maybe it would be better to limit those options to something that was a little more tangible,” said Logan, “We used a model that was actually like a bookstore, with a table display, because it’s very easy to look at.” This approach would serve as a template for the development of the modular design implemented across all of Maharam’s stores today.
According to Logan, the new Gramercy Park location is one of the company’s more grand endeavors. For the renovation, the design team updated the historic Beaux Arts–style building, whose prior tenant had been a FedEx. Logan and the design team reconfigured the storefront, replacing a former delivery door with a pair of soaring windows, which call attention to the space’s lofty ceilings while washing the interiors in bright natural light. Cantilevered granite slabs selected to match the building’s facade line the window sills creating a sense of continuity across the exterior and interior. Across the space, low wooden cabinetry, designed to echo the thickness of the building’s intact columns, create a natural division in the otherwise broad swath of space.
The building, originally designed in 1911, was commissioned by New York–based silk manufacturer J.H. & C.K. Eagle Corporation, which also occupied the building’s storefront. In keeping with this textile legacy, Maharam and Logan restored original historic features like herringbone parquet floors, painted a glossy gray, and egg-and-dart crown molding. The resulting space veers from the typical blank canvas of a showroom, offering a tranquil homage instead.