Showroom

Henrybuilt

Kitchens, custom furniture, and whole home storage systems. Founded 2001.

Henrybuilt makes kitchen and whole house storage systems and sells them direct, without a dealer in between. The New York showroom is at 16 Main Street in Dumbo rather than in Manhattan, which is a short trip and a different kind of visit from a Midtown suite.

Everything is made to order in the company's own Seattle facility, where Henrybuilt puts its output at around 7,000 projects since 2002. The kitchen is the core, and Opencase is the part that separates the house from a cabinet maker: a wall panel system that takes shelving, storage and specialised pieces and can be rearranged later rather than being fixed at installation. Primary Objects, including Shadowbox, are furniture and furniture like pieces bought individually rather than as part of a run.

Selling direct changes the conversation. There is no showroom margin and no agency, so the person planning the kitchen is the person whose company builds it and supports it afterwards, and a question about a hinge in five years goes to the same place.

What to see in person is the material and the movement. Drawer action and the weight of a door tell more about a system than any elevation, and Opencase has to be handled to understand that the flexibility is real rather than a rendering.

The showroom is open to the public, Monday to Friday from 10 to 5, with Saturday by appointment. Henrybuilt sells direct, so a homeowner can walk in and start a project without a designer.

Plan Opencase into the wall at first fix. It is a system that wants a substrate and a set of dimensions, and retrofitting it into a finished room is possible but wasteful. The moment to bring Henrybuilt in is when the partitions are still on paper, which on a Manhattan renovation means before the alteration agreement goes to the board.