Glenwood’s Best of NYC For Less: Home Design

Home Design in NYC Homes For Less

No question in our minds: New York City is the best place in the world to live, to work, to raise a family, to have fun, to eat and drink and play, to learn, to laugh, to love. Of course, no one moves here and says: “Everything is so inexpensive!” But that doesn’t mean you have to compromise your sense of style, especially in that most precious and personal of all New York City possessions, your home. The first of an occasional series of posts on how to get the best of New York City for less–the things we all want, but at prices that are bit more… comfortable–here’s a look at just a few of our favorite places to browse and buy great home designs for our NYC home.

Best of NYC for Less: Furniture

living room 

Sure, it would be great to drop a few hundred thousand dollars on Greene Street to furnish our home… but until then, there’s White Furniture. Now with three locations in Manhattan, Karazona Cinar’s stores are crammed full with gorgeous “unauthorized reproductions” (read: knock-offs) of some of our favorite contemporary pieces–sofas, tables, chairs of all description, lamps, clocks and other accessories–by the likes of Arne Jacobson, Fritz Hansen, Charles and Ray Eames, Verner Panton, Le Corbusier, Pier Giacomo, Herman Miller, Florence Knoll, and many others. These aren’t Ikea prices, mind you (a store which, for the record, we also like, especially now that they’re in nearby Red Hook), but a piece at White Furniture is always 50% to as much 90% less expensive than the real thing… and they’re so skillfully constructed, it’s likely that no one will know but you. White Furniture is located in Manhattan on White, Essex, and 26th Streets. For more information Glenwood’s Best of NYC for Less in home design takes you to the huge online catalog, visit the White website, here.

Best of NYC For Less: Home Design For Your Walls

home design logo 

Again, if money’s no object, a stroll through any one of almost a dozen of New York City’s “gallery districts” will get more world-class art than you could hang in a lifetime. For the rest of us,  Glenwood’s Best of NYC in home design gives you Jen Bekman’s 20 x 200 project. The concept here is simple: every week Beckman’s website, 20×200.com, posts two new, original pieces, one on paper-based, the other a photograph. Then, in editions limited by their size, each work of art is priced to please: two hundred 8″ x 10″ prints are available for $20 each; twenty 16″ x 20″ are $200 each; and, for big spenders, two 30″ x 40″ prints are on sale for $2,000 each. The quality of the pieces is almost always strong, the aesthetic appeal, of course, is up to the individual. “We believe everyone needs art” says Bekman, and 20×200.com is definitely a step in the right direction.

 artwork with water tower

Another (and one of our personal favorites in Manhattan home design) source of great, inexpensive design for our walls: the indie/alternative music gig poster. A somewhat fanatical subculture of semi-underground designers, these posters–ostensibly created for concerts, but mostly just done for the love of music, printmaking, typography and illustration–never fail to provoke appreciation and awe in visitors to our home. Plus they’re cheap, unfamiliar, and, of course, a whole lot of fun. For a quick look at what we’re talking about, this post of 69 favorites is good place to start. To purchase posters, our favorite site is Aesthetic Apparatus, and Insound.com also has a nice–though more expensive–selection. Also of note in our New York City for less home design ideas: Gigposters.com, which has just about everything, but is a tough browse.
 

Best of NYC for Less: Weekly Sales and Bargains

home design logo 

Apartmenttherapy.com posts piles of entertaining, truly useful advice every day on how to bring great design into your home. Among the many regular features we look forward to here is the weekly round-up of upcoming sales, events, and bargains covering every category you can imagine for home design in New York City, in stores, in pop-up shops, and at the sample sales we too often miss. Here’s the link to the weekend-sales guide section of the site, but take our advice, apartmenttherapy.com is worth a visit a lot more frequently than just once a week. 

Best of NYC for Less: Kitchen and Housewares

china

For the kitchen, Glenwood’s NYC for Less in home design presents Kiosk. No shopping excursion to Soho is complete without popping into Kiosk, an unassuming (kind of dingy, truth be told) second-floor space above a busy stretch of Spring Street that sells, well? just about whatever proprietors Alisa Grifo and her husband Marco ter Haar Romeny feel like, as long as it’s “humble, straightforward, and beautiful for its simplicity and directness.” Presented in “exhibition format”, and organized by country or area of origin (currently the theme is Provence; next up is Portugal) the low-priced objects at Kiosk stick around for four to six months, and then Grifo and Romeny almost completely turn over their inventory. The result is a lively, utterly unique, and almost always rewarding browsing and buying experience that’s a must for any serious Manhattan home design shopper. There’s a lot more than just kitchen tools and housewares here, but that’s what we most often go home with. Kiosk the store is located on Spring Street between Broadway and Mercer Street, and their website is located here.   

bowls 

Finally, no list of inexpensive options for home design in New York City would be complete without Pearl River Mart, that packed-to-the-rafters, Asian-flavored mega-store in Soho that stocks everything from shoes to wasabi peas to folding tables, but which we’ve relied upon for years for our tea cups, ice cream bowls, and paper ceiling lamps. Pearl River Mart is located on Broadway between Broome and Grand Streets. For lots more information and products, visit their website, here.

 Let us know your favorite ideas for home design in NYC! Stay tuned for more Glenwood’s NYC for Less…

 

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