Brooklyn’s Salter House Is Full of Covetable Home Goods, from Walnut Wood Spoons to Hand-Crafted Brooms
A couple years ago, while shuffling through Soho, I stumbled into a little gallery around the corner from McNally Jackson Books. A far cry from the antiseptic, white-walled expanses of the Chelsea heavyweights, it had warm wood floors and cozy dimensions and prices that didn’t make me lose sensation in my face. Stepping into it was more like entering the very well-curated flat of your Swedish theater-director aunt, or the pages of The Paris Review. (Some artists who illustrate TPR are sold at the gallery, it turns out.) It felt like home, and I immediately tucked three prints under my arm to bring into my own quarters.
Months later, I went searching for the gallery (it had the kind of name that was straightforward and yet somehow difficult to remember, and I have a terrible memory) and—tragedy!—I couldn’t find it. I vaguely remembered some association with the bookstore around the corner so I dutifully interrogated the cashier at McNally, who had no idea what I was talking about. A victim of rent hikes? Had I dreamed up the whole thing? New York gives, and New York takes away.
I resisted any strenuous googling, which made the discovery, years later, of Picture Room all the more serendipitous. I was walking down Atlantic Avenue, having migrated like any good parennial to Brooklyn, and there it was—a shop with that same home-away-from-home feeling. Graphic posters from 1970s art shows hung next to abstract swimming pool paintings by Leanne Shapton; a black and white grid of “Italian hand gestures” was a surrealist montage to rival Man Ray. Again, I wanted it all.
Last week, I visited the visionary behind Picture Room, Sandeep Salter, and her husband and “partner in life and work,” Carson Salter, to discuss their latest project: Salter House is an all-day home goods store and tea room opening September 7 that promises, like Picture Room, to be more than the sum of its parts. Part of what makes Picture Room so special, Sandeep explains, is that it’s a social space, and she wanted Salter House to have the same atmosphere. The coffee and tea counter is staffed by artists—“the best group show I’ve ever curated,” Sandeep jokes. (They’ve all endured barista training.)
A First Look at Brooklyn’s Salter House
Adjacent to Picture Room, Salter House operates as a metaphorical corollary as well. If Picture Room presents art as you might actually hang it in your halls, Salter House will bring an artistic refinement to the items that line your kitchen cabinets. When I saw the space, it was still in a state of pre-opening planning: stencils on the windows, bare shelves, tables without chairs. But you could also sense that it was going to be the kind of place where everything from the thickness of the teacups (thin—they’ll be Maria Theresia pattern Rosenthal china) to the width of the wood paneling (an echo of the aesthetic that Carson grew up with on his family’s farm in Georgia) was meticulously considered.
In fact, Salter House has an almost fabled feel to it—every aspect enriched by its creators’ obsessions. The logo, a girl looking down at her hands in a moment of quiet contemplation, is based on a woodcut that hung in the house of Sandeep’s childhood friend, an illustration of a W.B. Yeats’s poem produced by the poet’s sister for the small-scale printing company Cuala Press. The idea for the tea room had been simmering for decades; Sandeep would discuss it with her mother as a girl growing up in London’s Primrose Hill neighborhood. Glasgow’s Willow Tea rooms were also an inspiration, as was Liberty’s of London, and A. G. Hendey & Co. in the town of Hastings on England’s southern coast, a 16th-century house lovingly transformed into a retail space.
For all of its centuries-old sensibility, Salter House has a more contemporary aim as well: making everything they offer fully sustainable. “There won’t be any trash bins,” Sandeep proudly tells me. “Just compost and recycling. If you bring in trash, you can take it out!” The attitude extends to the products as well: minimalist jute shopping bags made by a Filipino company called Abacà, children’s enamel dinnerware illustrated with Moomin characters from Finnish artist Tove Jansson made by Muurla. “It’s a no-plastic shop,” Sandeep tells me, sipping from a stainless steel straw. A mother of two small children—she charmingly recounts her professional history in terms of when she was pregnant or how old her babies were—she saw a dearth of the kinds of toys and products she wanted to put into her kids’ hands.
As I was leaving, an employee started stocking the antique oak shelves that lined the walls. I averted my eyes to avoid walking out with a full shopping bag before the store had even opened. Watch out for those stores that are good for your soul.
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