One the Occasion of Its 80th Anniversary, Beloved Brand Knoll Brings a Better-than-ever Home Design Shop to Los Angeles
Los Angeles is known for its great stock—celebrities, pro athletes, top artists, tech innovators, and just about everyone on the beach. Now, there’s Knoll, which has dropped a new home design shop on Robertson Boulevard. Just blocks from Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, this dream of domestic bliss coincides with the brand’s birthday this year.
The opening of city’s design debutante marks new territory for Knoll, which comes to L.A. by way of New York City and has only two direct-to-consumer retail locations—our local outpost the sequel to its longer-running show in NYC. Coveted for its modern designs—those geometrized, cleaned-lined things from Mid-century Modern masters like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and current L.A. legend Frank Gehry—the au courant emporium is meant to connect two of the city’s more prolific communities: residential design professionals and consumers.
So totally on-tone, Knoll Home Design Shop looks as if it came straight from the L.A. design playbook, immersive in all the right ways. Given a clean, gleaming treatment by L.A.’s Johnston Marklee, in collaboration with Knoll design director Benjamin Pardo and interiors by Barbara Reimelt of NinetyNineGroup, the store is already a classic. Parsed as it is, in exquisitely appointed vignettes, with judicious placements of this fabric here and that furnishing there, it evokes that beautiful unfussiness that Modernists crave for their own space.
This is the point—to inspire. To preview the thoughtfully orchestrated environments in one’s midst, the eye shifting focus at precisely the right speed, is to immediately begin to rethink the living room. Maybe the dining room. Always the patio. But, oh, that these reimaginings look as good, or as effortless, as Knoll’s signature flick-of-the-wrist ease. More than just pretty pieces arranged just so, the shop supports a total design experience, where the arrangements of palette, materials and finishes augment the larger architectural space, which is an ode to Northern Italian architecture of the 1950s and 60s, inspired by Tangier York Castle and spaces from Knoll’s design archives.
The shop’s full spectrum of Knoll designs include new collections from the likes of David Adjaye and David Rockwell, along with classics from the likes of brand co-founder Florence Knoll and lauded Modernist Marcel Breuer. Also on show are Knoll designs now available stateside for the first time, including Avio sofas, Grasshopper tables by Piero Lissoni and Tobia Scarpa’s Bastiano lounge collection. Look for the introduction of upscale fabrics and find lustrous finishes for one-of-a-kind customizations for residential and home office applications.
The building housing it all—and then some—is itself something of a splendor, its façade of hand-polished grey terrazzo with white marble aggregate and brass details around windows the size of the open sky is Old-World meets the New for all to see. La dolce vita, L.A. style.
Photographs Courtesy of Knoll Home Design Shop/ Eric Staudenmaier
