3 Key Rules for Interior Design Online Shopping

Jay Johnson - Shopping online for furnishings and home goods? Well, good luck to you. Some people need to sit in a chair or sofa in order to experience what it would be like to use the furnishings in everyday use situations. But most people love the convenience of online shopping, and it's a great way to shop around from store to store while saving gas, driving time, parking, and in-store jostling. Do you remember when most people went into book stores to buy books? Now 60% of all books are bought on Amazon.com - and online stores are growing in popularity and sales that outrun their brick-and-mortar counterparts.

In a recent guest post I wrote for Williams-Sonoma Designer Marketplace - which, by the way, is an excellent collection of advice for anyone interested in interior design - NYC designer Irwin Weiner and I checked out Pottery Barn online; he selected some favorites and we applied three criteria for picking out excellence in interior design purchases in an online experience. Read the Williams-Sonoma piece here: How to Shop Online for Your Clients. (It actually applies to purchasing home goods for yourself, too.) Check out the items we loved during our online shopping spree, and click on the photos in this article to see my current favorites from the store. Happy online shopping!

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Kiosk Showcases Handmade World Goods

(Hammock Swing, courtesy of Kiosk)

Janet Ramin - In an era of excess, big box stores, and homogenization, one can easily miss the small stores that offer original products made by local artisans. And in a city the size of New York, finding that unique store is the equivalent of finding gold in a riverbed of common rocks. But New York certainly doesn’t lack inventive entrepreneurs. Enter Alisa Grifo and Marco tel Haar Romeny.

Alisa was a burnt-out set designer. She wanted a new way to express her creative side and somehow combine travel with it. She met Marco in Sweden who was also looking for ways to put his computer expertise to good use. Combine the two, shake well, and you have Kiosk.

Kiosk is a curated store that acts more like a gallery, offering products from around the world. Alisa and Marco’s philosophy involved hunting down unique items that reflected the culture of the country they were visiting and bringing it back to their store to share it with their customers, along with the product's history. In the past several years, their collections included items brought back from Japan, Sweden, Mexico, Germany, Portugal, Finland, and of course America. Currently their collection focuses on items from America, many from the state of Vermont. Above is a hammock swing from Vermont.

(Fawn Sled, courtesy of Kiosk)

Kiosk also offers a fawn sled from Minnesota, made of ash wood and great for those snowy hills (above photo)! From India, we have the Tiffin lunch box, used by many natives (next photo, below). The Tiffin is very practical and offers three compartments to store various foods - and it includes plates to eat on. 

(Tiffin lunch box, courtesy of Kiosk)

Past collections also included Fortuna, an old-fashioned pinball game from Jukka Toys in Finland, a butterfly can opener from Japan, furniture wedges from Germany (so practical for those wobbly furniture on uneven floors), to name a few (see photos below). 

Past collections also included Fortuna, an old-fashioned pinball game from Jukka Toys in Finland, a butterfly can opener from Japan, furniture wedges from Germany (so practical for those wobbly furniture on uneven floors), to name a few. 

Besides accessories and toys, Kiosk also carries unique foods that you won’t find in your local supermarket: chestnut paste from Provence, dried salted tuna (Muxama de Atumc) from Portugal, cloudberry jam (Hjortron Sylt) from Sweden, and smoked cherry blossom herbal beverage (Sakura Rosen) from Japan. 

Their offerings are far-flung and eclectic, making shopping at Kiosk truly a global adventure.