Design Stores
A list of the coolest design shops around.
Rose and Radish
Hayes Valley - San Francisco, CA United StatesKnown for its dramatic, beautiful floral arrangements, Rose & Radish has turned its keen design sense to home design. Alongside flowers, their modern gallery space now presents an expertly curated collection of home accessories. From...
Scandinavian Details
Hayes Valley - San Francisco, CA United StatesWhether vintage, vintage reproduction, or new work, Scandinavian furniture designs have no shortage of stores dedicated to them. Scandinavian Details gives Scandinavian accessories their day in the sun. There are elegant glasswares, clever...
Scandinavian Grace
Williamsburg - Brooklyn, NY United StatesScandinavian Grace features all the best of Scandinavian design in one simple, modern presentation. If the shop is a window in to the world of every day Scandinavian life then all we have to say is "where do we sign up?". Modern, svelt...
SF MOMA Store
SoMa - San Francisco, CA United StatesThe store of San Francisco's pride-and-joy museum is, by extension, rather well appointed. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's (MOMA) store is stocked certainly with books and postcards of the art of display, but more interesting is...
Spoonbill & Sugartown
Williamsburg - Brooklyn, NY United StatesCompeting with superstores and online shops with impossibly large warehouses is useless if you're a small bookseller so Spoonbill & Sugartown did the only thing it could do: focus. Art and design in its many forms (film, photography,...
Spring
DUMBO - Brooklyn, NY United StatesIndeed, the design and art on display at Spring is as crisp and fresh as a spring day. All around are dozens of examples of cool, clever, modern design that you likely have not seen before. We should know, we've been to dozens of designs at...
St. Mark's Bookshop
East Village - New York, NY United StatesIf you put a general bookstore in the hands of an artist, St. Mark's Bookshop is what you would get. Among the black shelving and exposed ducting are a nice selection of new fiction and nonfiction with a strong emphasis on design, art, and...
Studio Brillantine
West Queen West - Toronto, ON CanadaDesign stores with fun stuff to look at are so passé. At Studio Brillantine, the design items look right back at you. Tin-Tin grins back at your from a tall glass, funny faces meet your gaze from corkscrews and clocks, coasters and ice buckets....
Swipe
Queen Street West - Toronto, ON CanadaAsk your local bookstore where the "retail design" or "typography" sections are and watch them return a blank stare. Ask the people at Swipe and they'll likely follow-up with "Are you interested in historical...
Tate Modern Shop
Southwark - London, United StatesStart with the wall of books. Tate Modern, the venerable venue of modern art that it is, is not content to merely sell tote bags, T-shirts and prints. The wall of books runs the entire length of the oblong space. Titles cover art from all its...
The Future Perfect
Williamsburg - Brooklyn, NY United StatesThe vision of the future presented to us in TV and movies always seems to involve one-piece body-hugging spandex suits and furnishings whose purpose is not outwardly apparent. We much prefer the future as presented by The Future Perfect. The...
Tivoli Home
DUMBO - Brooklyn, NY United StatesOperating out of an impossibly small space, Tivoli Home showcases Scandinavian design in remarkable breadth and depth. The shop goes beyond the handful of Scandinavian manufacturers whose wares are now widely available to find a slew of smaller...
Tortoise
Abbot Kinney - Venice, CA United StatesSo you thought you were cool when you saw "Lost in Translation" before anyone else, but now the whole world has seen it. It's time to kick your Japano-phile induced coolness up a few notches by visiting Tortoise. "Those are...
Twentieth
Mid City/Beverly - Los Angeles, CA United StatesTwentieth rents its furniture for movie and TV sets with regularity and there are no shortage of pieces that are in the compact car price range. But that shouldn't stop you from stopping by anyway. The huge store is a space worth visiting...
Up To You
Leslieville - Toronto, ON CanadaReader Suggested: The store is set up like an apartment with every thing for sale. It is a wicked store and most of the products in it I have never seen before. The store has a sophisticated feel.
Yolk
Silverlake - Los Angeles, CA United StatesThere's a good chance that any two adjacent design items at Yolk were produced thousands of miles apart, are made of completely different materials, and are in completely different price ranges. Such is the global, frenetic world of product...
Zakka
SoHo - New York, NY United StatesZakka is a one of a kind shop and gallery, collecting design books from many different design disciplines. Furthermore it keeps an office Japan and thus is in tune with what's happening in Japanese design and subculture. The result is a...
Zinc Details
Pacific Heights - San Francisco, CA United StatesIf you know anything about San Francisco, it's that a design store where everyone wears black turtlenecks will be a miserable failure. The owners of Zinc Details appreciate the wear flowers in you hair attitude of San Francisco. All you have...