Designo Selects: An Interview with Murray Moss

The lobby of Murray Moss’s new enterprise is a far cry from the white-on-white-on-white minimalist eponymous design emporium over which he presided, on Soho’s Greene Street in New York, for 18 years.

The walls are lined in creamy tile, the ceiling edged with gold paint, the elevator lined in marble-pattern laminate. Moss, dressed as always in a white shirt, black jacket, looks as out of place here as he would on the Garment District street outside, where neighbours include an office furniture mart, a maker of batik maxi-skirts, and a corner kiosk where a rainbow array of rubber iPhone covers sway in the breeze.

But take the elevator to the 10th floor and the view becomes more rarefied. Between a pair of gold-anodised window frames sits a frame worthy of Snow White’s Queen: Studio Job’s 2008 Bavaria marquetry mirror, rosewood doors inlaid with laser-cut barns, bluebirds, roosters and blossoms.