For its flagship in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City, Alessi, the ultra-design-conscious Italian manufacturer of household objects, found a hot location—on Greene Street, where a dense cluster of design stores guarantees high-volume, well-heeled pedestrian traffic. But the narrow, 13-foot-wide storefront in a renovated loft building lacked dramatic presence. Although the long, 1,800-square-foot interior widens to 21 feet toward the rear, the place posed yet another problem, namely “too much space for this kind of retail operation,” as Jan Vingerhoets, Alessi USA’s executive vice president, puts it. But he and Alberto Alessi, the company’s joint general manager, hit on a solution: an espresso bar inside the shop. The concession, serving on Alessi tableware, would draw potential customers, while demonstrating that these fanciful objects were not just for collecting.

For both the interior and graphic design, Alessi hired Asymptote Architecture, a New York firm, whose principals, Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture, have forged an avant-garde reputation based on digitally generated forms. Alessi’s mandate was to update the store image from its 1980s Postmodern heyday, when it purveyed playful polychromed objects by Michael Graves, Aldo Rossi, Hans Hollein, and others in similarly colorful and whimsical shops by Atelier Mendini. While those stores functioned well in presenting Alessi’s evolving line by later generations of vanguard architects and designers, including Asymptote, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Toyo Ito, “it was time to be different,” says Vingerhoets, “especially in New York.”