CASA VALLE

An unexpected way station steps from the thrum of Manhattan’s Canal Street and the Tribeca arts and design district, Casa Valle represents both portal to and holistic extension of our world. A collaboration between Giancarlo Valle and Jane Keltner de Valle, the space serves as the public offering of the Studio’s made-to-order furniture collection, an extension of the couple’s home that functions as both a laboratory for working through ideas, constantly in flux, and a bridge, from imagination into reality. Recalling the neighborhood’s beginnings as sylvan marshland that connected the freshwater Collect Pond, where City Hall now sits, to the Hudson River, the gallery takes its cue from the eighteenth century Lispenard family home, reinterpreting domestic scale within downtown loft proportions. The space delights in pleasing collisions: an abstracted clapboard house snugged into a cast iron building; colonial-era language spoken with an industrial lilt; the Studio’s collection in conversation with historic design sourced around the world. Downstairs, a library opens onto a skylight room, a multivalent space to nurture further conversation, for welcoming friends, and making new ones.