Showroom

Apparatus

By appointment

A Manhattan design studio founded in 2012, showing lighting, furniture, and objects in immersive environments. Materials run to marble, suede, and hand patinated brass.

Apparatus is a studio that makes what it shows. Gabriel Hendifar founded it in New York in 2012 and directs the design, and the West 30th Street space is the studio's own room rather than a dealer carrying a line.

It is staged as rooms. Lighting, furniture and objects are set in full settings with wall finishes and floor coverings chosen to hold them, so what is on display is an argument about how the pieces sit together rather than a floor of products in rows. That is useful and it is also a complication, because a fixture read against a dark lacquered wall will not read the same way in a white room, and the showroom will not tell anyone that.

Visiting is by appointment, Monday to Friday, on the fourth floor. There is no street window and nothing to look at from the pavement, so arriving without an appointment means arriving at a locked door.

Brass is the material to examine in person. The patinas are applied by hand and they are a range rather than a finish, so two pieces in the same specification will differ, and they will keep moving after installation unless they have been lacquered. Anyone matching a fixture to existing hardware needs to see it under the light it will live in.

The rooms are built around dark lacquer and deep colour, which flatters patinated brass and will not predict how the same fixture reads above a pale plaster wall. Holding the finish against the actual wall sample, and asking which pieces are lacquered and which are left to keep moving, settles in one visit what photographs will not settle at all.