The cobbled streets of Soho and the spacious glass towers in midtown Manhattan may be the main stomping grounds for New Yorkers when a kitchen requires outfitting, but Vipp’s new American showroom is luring designers to the less-trodden district of Tribeca instead.
Housed in a cosy, four-storey building (a sausage factory in its former life), Vipp’s New York City showroom (its first in the US and outside of Europe) is a veritable home away from home. The company’s co-owner Sofie Christensen Egelund (who is its communication and concept director as well as founder Holger Nielsen’s granddaughter) literally resides in the space with her husband Frank Christensen Egelund, a VP at Vipp, and their two young children.
’We wanted to keep the industrial atmosphere together with displaying our products in a very personal setting,’ she says about the living concept. ’It is constructed like a real apartment and hopefully this helps with imagining how it must be like living surrounded by Vipp products.
Like so many of its other enterprises, Vipp’s space offers a lovely reprieve to the hustle of urban life. Visitors to the apartment step out of the palpitating rush of the Financial District nearby and venture up several flights of stairs before entering the cool, minimal space. On arrival, the loft opens with the Vipp kitchen, comprised of a tall module (containing refrigerator and oven), a kitchen island that includes a dishwasher and sink, and a wall module for additional storage, before extending back to reveal a living room, office and bedrooms.
’We completely reconstructed the space to optimise the natural light,’ says Christensen Egelund. ’The original kitchen was located at the other end, so we had a lot of structural work to do. We changed everything from the floor and windows to the colour of the walls. Only the freight elevator remained in place, for obvious reasons!’
The alluring display of products, which ranges from Vipp’s shapely ceramics collection and industrial lighting to its sleek bathroom fixtures and its iconic bin (of course), is made all the more enticing by the couple’s personal collection of designer furniture and offers of homemade cortado or tea to those who pass by. An elegant extension of the company’s sophisticated Danish aesthetic, the real trick is in finding the willpower to leave.
