7 Highlights From Basic.Space’s First New York Event

While an avid design collector can spend a year bouncing around the globe after another fair, in-person shopping is increasingly challenged by online shops. In response, show organizers are chasing alternative modes of interaction with collectors, especially among younger generations. One company that may have unlocked the passcode to unique engagements is Basic.Space, a design retail platform that made the news last year with their acquisition of Design Miami.

“Some retailers overemphasize online [retail] and traditional companies don’t really invest in the online experience—we try to achieve both,” Basic.Space CEO Jesse Lee tells Interior Design. Lee started Basic.Space five years ago as an online platform. Within a few months, however, the CEO had added physical experiences with the likes of filmmaker and artist Harmony Korine and the late designer Virgil Abloh.

The brand is now claiming the spotlight with their first in-person experience in New York—but don’t call it a fair. The outing, which occupies an entire 20,000-square-foot floor at the former Estée Lauder U.S. headquarters in SoHo, echoes as an homage to the neighborhood’s heyday as a creative hub, a time when cut-throat deals were sealed and stars could be made overnight with a cover story. This subtly theatrical ambiance hints at the company’s ethos as a malleable enterprise. The VIP reception of their inaugural New York outing on Thursday saw mounts of caviar and passed martinis, in the true fashion of the era the show aims to replicate. Sales associates were available at every corner to top the visitors’ in-person experience with an immediate acquisition through their iPads.

Room that once served as offices were outfitted with the likes of the late Gaetano Pesce, Crosby Studios, Eckhaus Latta, David Zwirner, Nick Thomm, LoveWatts, Gufram, Carpenters Workshop Gallery, and Roham Shamekh. The large communal spaces, on the other hand, were occupied with installations by a range of recognizable names, such as Ateliers Courbet, Max Lamb, Devon Turnbull, MSCHF, Achille Salvagni Atelier, Samuel Ross, AMEN, and MATTE Projects. Mini group shows curated by KidSuper and Marquel Rashaad Williams offered compact selections from singular visions within the larger diagram. The event offers a statement on the gradual blending of disciplines. “The line between design, fashion, and art is only getting more blurry,” Lee says, who also admits the challenge of “discerning good work” in an industry where creatives dabble in different spaces.

Basic.Space Stages A Striking First Outing

La Terra di Neena x Crosby Studios

The Tuscany-based newcomer olive oil company La Terra di Neena makes the New York debut of their small batch product in collaboration with Crosby Studios, a design studio with a cult following thanks to Harry Nuriev and his life and work partner Tyler Billinger’s chrome-washed sleek vision. It is no secret that the duo is also behind the olive oil venture, which stems from their new Tuscan farmhouse that they share with Billinger’s parents. Here, in the couple’s signature cutting-edge fashion, a giant olive oil bottle—albeit crumbled—stands next to its smaller versions which function as stools. Life size bottles on a shelf, on the other hand, contain an early batch of the extra virgin product.

AMEN

The Uruguay-born candle-maker Rodrigo García, of AMEN, makes his New York debut with his biomorphic light sculptures, titled The Shape of Light, which result from a collaboration with sculptor Katharina Kaminski. Each of the four ceramic vessels which sold out in the VIP reception’s first hour contains wax and a wick, allowing for a poetically moody luminosity when lit as well as releasing different scents produced and poured in Grasse. A gold glazed version stands out with its gilded charm, blended with clay’s natural roughness on the surface.

Ateliers Courbet

Following last year’s Salon Art + Design participation, Chelsea gallery Ateliers Courbet moves downtown for another group presentation that features Mexican design studio EWE and 2025 Interior Design Hall of Fame inductee Héctor Esrawe, as well as new works by Hamza Kadiri. The Moroccan designer’s outing is timely as he makes his New York solo exhibition debut at the gallery this week, showcasing both new sculptural furniture and those he created at his Casablanca studio. Moody in appearance and fluid in form, furniture pieces, such as a gently-formed wooden bench, compliment Esrawe’s bronze benches which resemble mysterious architectural forms.

Max Lamb for Salon 94

A scene-stealer is a sprawling installation of chairs by Max Lamb for Salon 94 which invites the visitors to wander through seaters in polystyrene and rubber polymer or western red cedar, in addition to two wall-hangings in dyed hand-tufted wool. The British designer’s appetite to explore the lengths that chair design can reach offers whimsical takes, which is perhaps most clear in the Ghost Poly series that pays homage to Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures, titled Ghost. Playing with ideas of singularity and repetition, the rubber chairs stem from their wooden versions in the material’s radiant and pop nature.

Alexander May for USM

Perhaps no presentation embodies the show’s overall 1980s power-driven creative workforce energy better than Alexander May’s office desk design for USM. And what can radiate fierce desire for success more sharply than the blinding shininess of the iconic Swiss brand’s chrome-plated steel frames and its powder-coated steel panels? Anchoring an installation named The Executive Office, the black-hued desk, titled The Collector’s Desk, contains all the classic cues of USM’s modular Haller furniture, elevated here with a scenography that includes screens that operate as windows of a skyscraper and a thrilling sculpture by Julius Margulies which sits on the desk in the form of a monster emerging from a ’90s computer screen.

Roham Shamekh

As the Middle East continues to gain momentum as a hub of creative markets, artists, and designers from the region expand their footprints. Roham Shamekh exhibits a series of chairs, such as the humanoid Angel Manifestation Chair which is created in handmade and carved fiber resin. Replicating the human torso, the seater radiates the Tehran-born and Dubai-based designer’s enigmatic language in furniture with an open-ended narrative power. In contrast is a duo of geometric chairs with sharp angular forms and shiny silver surfaces. Out of the two, Scavenger on Earth expands the storytelling aspect of Shamekh’s practice with an artichoke flower figure rendered in resin.

Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner

Art galleries join the multidisciplinary conversation with works that contribute to the overall dynamic narrative of the retail experience. Among them, powerhouse gallery David Zwirner dedicates a room to Marcel Dzama’s whimsical and singular visual universe which pulls cues from traditional European circus, dreams, and myths, all through the lens of a conscious temporality. Gouache and ink drawings and collages travel through figures—both human and animal—immersed in opaque enigmatic rituals in an unclear time period between a romanticized past and a hopeful future. 

Editor’s Note: Basic.Space was open from Friday, November 14 to Sunday November 16, 2025.