Showroom

Studio Van den Akker

Trade account to buy

Furniture, lighting, and architectural products, including hand blown glass made with Seguso of Murano.

Studio Van den Akker occupies a suite in the D&D Building at 979 Third Avenue, which is open to the public, and buying requires a trade account. Rob Copley and Sean Robins founded it, and what makes it worth a separate visit is that it runs two businesses off one floor.

One is its own collection, furniture, lighting and architectural elements made to order. The other is vintage, bought rather than represented, which means those pieces exist in the quantity they exist in and cannot be reordered. A designer walking the floor is looking at two different kinds of availability side by side, and knowing which is which changes what can be promised to a client.

The register is consistent across both, modern without being cold and detailed without being fussy, which is what lets a vintage piece and a current one sit in the same room without either looking like a concession.

The studio keeps showrooms in Los Angeles, Dallas, Denver, South Florida and Atlanta as well as New York, so a piece seen here can often be inspected by a client who is somewhere else.

Ask which side of the floor a piece is on before it goes on a board. The made to order work carries a lead time and can be specified in a finish, and the vintage cannot be specified at all, only bought. Schemes fail in the gap between those two, where a designer has shown a client a vintage pair and the project needs four.