Beloved NYC design store seeks new home for its extensive archive

New Yorkers of a certain vintage will remember the store KIOSK, which lived downtown from 2005 to 2015. If you’d been there, how could you not?

“It was kind of the dream ‘New York secret spot,’” said Chay Costello, a longtime director at the MoMA Design Store. “That maybe you know about, that other people don’t know about.”

The shop, or design museum, or rotating folk art installation, was always a little hard to describe. For one, you had to find it.

The store has been online only since 2015, but its first home was at 95 Spring Street, a building since torn down to make room for Nike’s gargantuan store on the corner of Spring and Broadway.

If you managed to find the doorway and navigate one floor up the graffiti-covered, pre-war stairwell, you found yourself transported far from the increasingly unrecognizable, hypercommercial neighborhood that was swirling frantically into being outside.

It was a place where you could find simple items from around the world, curated and arranged so that customers understood who made the objects and why they mattered.

Now, the beloved emporium is looking for a new home for its archive of more than 1,500 objects – with a deadline of Thanksgiving to vacate from its current space.

KIOSK was a retail experience unlike any other. Here’s how it worked: partners Alisa Grifo and Marco ter Haar Romeny would visit an interesting place – in Japan, say – and hang out for a while, meeting people, getting to know them, embedding.

In the course of their travel, they would identify everyday objects that hadn’t been widely seen outside their local context before – scotch tape dispensers and slippers, a surprisingly flashy bag or a long-handled spoon, rubber bands, nice paper, a red-tipped crowbar–…