A new showroom for contract furniture in New York, especially an established brand like Italian manufacturer Arper, is a welcome sight indeed. Even though the brand’s opening party happened on a rainy Thursday evening, which typically dampens enthusiasm, the showroom, located at 476 Broadway in the trendy SoHo section of town, was filled with interested design professionals eager to see the new space and products the company presented for this occasion.
“We have been occupying this space for about four years,” said Claudio Feltrin, CEO of Arper. “We’ve used it primarily as an office for our North American operations, but it is time to open it up to the larger design community. There is a big difference between studying the market outside of its context and inside its context. At this showroom, we choose now to study and work with the market inside the North American context.”
Housed in a historic building dating back to 1904, the sprawling second-floor space features giant windows and ample sunlight. Through the vast windows, one can see sides of the imposing columns that decorate its historic facade, adding a layer of texture to the otherwise minimal interior design.
New York-based architect Solveig Fernlund was responsible for the architecture and interior design of the space. Barcelona-based design firm Lievore Altherr Molina, long-time collaborators of Arper and involved in the design of most of the product collections, was the creative director in charge of the furniture display. The result was a knockout. A large showroom that feels intimate.
Arper is one of those brands that refers to a home or office lifestyle obliquely. Much of its furniture could be treated like a blank canvas; to a talented designer, the same piece of furniture could be transformed in multiple ways to fit in many different environments with just a few small touches.
Giving an example of how a zipper comes together, Mr. Feltrin noted, “With New York and Europe in general, everything is beginning to line up. There is a big community of architects and designers that speak the international design language in both places; I can’t help but see New York as the perfect place to showcase Arper for projects here and abroad.”
For Mr. Feltrin and everyone at Arper, this showroom is a long-term investment and a strategy for continued growth. Compared to the only other North American Arper showroom, in Chicago, which opened several years ago, the New York showroom is much larger and intent on showing multiple vignettes of different ways of working and collaborating.
“We bring the comfort and the color and the warmth of the home to the office space,” said Mr. Feltrin. “Today it may be common knowledge, but it is how Arper got to where we are in the industry today.”
From the time of the company’s founding in 1989 all the way to 1999, the main focus of the company was on residential furnishings.
“We were following style more than creating a design direction,” he said. Starting in 2000, the design concept of the company started to gain prominence. “In 2000, we were invoicing €5 million, and at the end of 2014, we invoiced €65 million.”
In recent years, Arper has also begun to grow a U.S. sales staff.
“We now have 18 new sales associates across North America, said Mr. Feltrin. “We came to realize that it is also important for us to produce the items we are selling in this country. “We opened a manufacturing location in High Point, North Carolina late last year. We realized that shipping of each product was taking up to 10 weeks to get to the U.S. At High Point, we are concentrating on the last steps of the manufacturing process, primarily upholstery. Many times these are the last things the architect or designer will decide on anyway. Depending on the product, some arrive halfway finished, and others arrive just needing upholstery. We reduced our shipping time from 10 weeks to three to five weeks. The focal point was to get the shipping times quicker, but it is also good methodology of quality control.”
Addressing acoustics may currently be a popular thing for a lot of American contractmanufacturers to do; Arper goes about it in their usual timeless and design-forward style. Parentesit, a new wall-mounted acoustical panel made by Arper and designed by Lievore Altherr Molina, reduces extraneous background noise and creates a space for concentration. The bold, graphic forms are available in three shapes – a circle, a square or an oval – that speak to diverse environments and can be further customized with the addition of a speaker or ambient light. These geometric forms can stand alone or pair together for greater impact. The signature and elemental shapes of Parentesit complement Arper’s clean, minimal language to create a visual element that is as functional as it is modern.
“Our main focal point is society,” said Mr. Feltrin. “We look out and discover which changes are happening, and how those changes fall into the office space. With changes in technology for example, the office doesn’t matter as much, and you are working from a hotel lounge, a coffee shop or wherever. We look to the demands of the market and what may ease those demands more than anything.”
Whether you’re around the corner, or just visiting NYC, we encourage you to snag some time to check out the new showroom!
