Alessi’s second New York store – for the company’s high-design kitchen, office and home products – was designed with a museum-style atmosphere. But Jan Vingerhoets, Alessi USA’s executive vp, says the products are anything but sculptures. “We design our products to look beautiful, but we want people to actually use them.”

The retailer’s products do resemble works of art, especially considering the big names behind several of the objects: Michael Graves, Philippe Starck, Frank Gehry. The store’s museum-style environment allows the retailer to change displays of designer pasta strainers or top-notch teaspoons regularly – the way an art gallery switches with each new artist.

It’s an assemblage of design at Alessi’s Madison Avenue boutique, where both the products and store resemble works of art.

To do this, Alessi chose modular fixtures designed by renowned architect Hani Rashid that can be configured as needed and a backlit shelf embedded in the store’s curved back wall. The fixtures, while designed for beauty, are also meant to draw the eye to the merchandise.

As in a museum, white is the predominant color in the store, found on the fixtures, walls and ceiling. The one visual pop is the tangerine floor. “It gets us away from the ‘too minimalist’ look,” Vingerhoets says. “Of course we love minimalism, but we also love crazy and funky.” The white and orange marry the minimal and the funky, what Vingerhoets calls “Alessianism,” and don’t compete with the colorful products.

Fixtures are modular to allow the merchandise to change regularly. A curved, graphic-covered wall adds to the shop’s funky, yet modern flair.

A curved wall covered in a computer-generated flower graphic adds to the store’s whimsical, yet modern flavor. Its pixilated nature makes it hard to pinpoint the exact identity – a sort of Rorschach-test element of surprise.

And surprise is the key for Alessi. It’s not reinventing the wheel; a tea kettle or lemon squeezer has and always will be a kitchen commodity. Alessi’s job is to keep shoppers on their toes, waiting for design innovation, a different twist to the familiar. “The boutique surprises people,” Vingerhoets says. “We want them to come in and think ‘wow’ about the design of the products and the store.”

Illuminated display boxes, inset into the wall, highlight a range of wall clocks.

The tangerine floor pops against the predominately white space.

Client: Alessi, New York

Design/Architect/Props and Decoratives: Alessi S.p.A, Crusinallo, Italy – Emanuele Sartori, architect

Audio/Visual: Bose, New York

Fixtures: Visplay Intl.(Vitra), New York

Signage/Graphics/Wallcoverings/Materials: Asymptote, New York

Photography: Courtesy of Alessi USA, New York