By appointment only in New York: Six hidden shops worth visiting

Straits Times

19 hours ago

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NEW YORK – You did not come to New York to wander fluorescent aisles hunting for someone to unlock the fitting room.
You came for the locked-door city – where nothing is labelled, the lift grumbles and whoever buzzes you in has already decided how the afternoon should go.
You might leave with a sterling silver carabiner, a fossilised dinosaur foot or a record that makes everything else on your shelf sound flat. Or maybe it was just a book you did not know you were missing until it looked back at you.
But do not bother dropping by. These places do not do foot traffic. You e-mail. You call a landline. You wait. Maybe you DM. There is no signage, no small talk, no piped-in jazz.
What there is: hand-forged armour, prehistoric bones with six-figure price tags, music that has never been digitised, a jewellery showroom with the logic of a toolbox and – if you are buzzed in – a private library (with all the books for sale) that reads like someone's inner filing system.
This is not retail. It is an invitation-only obsession. And if you knock with purpose, that helps.
Globus Washitsu, 889 Broadway, Union Square, Manhattan
A kimono-styling class at Globus Washitsu near Union Square in New York. This Kyoto-style tatami room has been meticulously built by the investor and long-time Japanophile Stephen Globus.
PHOTO: HIROKO MASUIKE/NYTIMES
Up a nondescript lift near Union Square, through a quiet hallway and a final sliding door, is something few New Yorkers expect to find above Broadway: a Kyoto-style tatami room meticulously built by investor and long-time Japanophile Stephen Globus.
Think shoji screens, hinoki beams, seasonal scrolls – nothing here is an approximation. It is the real deal.
Globus Washitsu is not a commercial teahouse. It is a cultural space with two adjoining tatami rooms, carefully designed for a range of intimate, immersive experiences.
One of the rooms, KeiSui-An, is a traditional teahouse used for lessons in Japanese tea ceremony ( US$50 or S$64 a person for members, US$60 for non-members) – but the entire space shifts as needed to host calligraphy workshops, rakugo storytelling nights, kimono exhibitions and other quiet arts of Japan: music, dance, ikebana.
It also occasionally serves as a ryokan-style guesthouse for visiting artists and scholars.
You e-mail for an appointment, remove your shoes at the door and enter a hushed, warm space where calm is not a marketing promise, but a policy. Whether you are there for tea or to simply sit and listen, you leave feeling quieter. And in this city, that is no small thing.
Marla Aaron, ninth floor, 37 West 47th Street, Diamond District, Manhattan
Marla Aaron's appointment-only showroom in New York.
PHOTO: HIROKO MASUIKE/NYTIMES
Most people come to the Diamond District for a ring. But here, you will find a sterling silver carabiner with a click so satisfying, it should be studied.
Ms Marla Aaron is not your typical jeweller. She is a high-end designer with a locksmith's brain, a sculptor's eye and a deep love of things that open and shut. Her appointment-only showroom feels more like a jeweller's laboratory crossed with a toy chest. Drawers of chains. Trays of tools. Jewellery cases that double as sewing boxes.
Her signature locks – platinum and brass, ranging from US$110 to over US$250,000 for one especially extravagant version, made from pink diamonds – are meant to be held, twisted and remixed. They have been sold from vending machines, smuggled into museum shows and handed out by the thousands to single mothers on Mother's Day.
In 2024, Ms Aaron won the GEM Award for Jewelry Design given out by the Jewelers of America. She recently opened a mini-store inside Liberty – the iconic department store in London – but the original New York showroom is still where the story clicks into place.
Appointments are booked online and virtual appointments are available for out-of-towners – her team walks clients through the collection over Zoom with the same care for detail and touch.
'The showroom is my pride,' she said. Book ahead – and prepare to leave with something you will not want to stop clicking open and closed.
WassonArtistry, Ridgewood, Queens
A suit of armour at WassonArtistry, an appointment-only shop in Ridgewood, Queens.
PHOTO: HIROKO MASUIKE/NYTIMES
In Ridgewood, inside a factory building with no signage, Mr Jeffrey Wasson is doing something very few people alive can do: forging mediaeval armour by hand, exactly the way it was done 600 years ago.
He studied at the School of Visual Arts, fell in with the Society for Creative Anachronism and got hooked on hammering metal. More than two decades on, he builds custom suits for jousters, re-enactors, museums and films, including Men In Black 3 (2012). His work is also permanently displayed at Discovery Park of America in Tennessee.
This is not a shop. It is a working forge, and appointments are required. It smells like scorched steel and something more elemental: a lived-in focus that does not pause for small talk. Clients are measured in person and return for fittings as pieces are roughed, shaped and refined.
Mr Jeffrey Wasson works on a breastplate at WassonArtistry.
PHOTO: HIROKO MASUIKE/NYTIMES
Mr Wasson's Italian-style helms and battle-ready gauntlets are researched down to the rivet spacing. One finished suit rests in the corner, heavy and ready.
You can commission a full suit of armour (US$15,000 to US$50,000), take a private dagger-forging class (US$650) or join an occasional New York Adventure Club visit (US$32). No themed music, no cosplay – just iron, fire and a guy who has spent 20 years turning a childhood obsession into serious plate armour.
Archivio Records, Unit 401, 247 Water Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn
Inside Archivio Records in New York.
PHOTO: HIROKO MASUIKE/NYTIMES
Archivio is more vinyl bunker than retail space. It is a Dumbo concept store: part record shop, DJ hub, barbershop, tattoo parlour and creative hangout.
Co-founded by sound engineer and DJ Pablo Romero (a Queens native who asked for a shout-out to his Colombian background) and DJ Daniel Corral-Webb, this upstairs loft draws an international mix: visiting DJs, stylists, design-world regulars and the curious who have heard whispers.
There is an obsessively curated selection of electronic vinyl, from 1980s house to obscure techno subgenres (from US$5 to US$200). Romero is known for matching people to records with eerie precision.
A barber and a tattoo artist work on clients at Archivio Records.
PHOTO: HIROKO MASUIKE/NYTIMES
There is a n appointment-only tattoo set-up and barbershop at the back, where Mr Camo Contreras tattoos in one chair and Mr Christian Restrepo cuts hair in the next.
During my visit, a young and hip London DJ was crate-digging up front while someone in the back debated tattoo placement between fades. It is by appointment, not attitude. Archivio does not advertise; it does not need to. People who need it tend to find it, including a few celebrities who either show up on their Instagram – or make sure they do not.
High Valley Books, 882 Lorimer Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn
The basement of High Valley Books in New York.
PHOTO: SCOTT ROSSI/NYTIMES
There is no sign. Just a buzzer and a plain Greenpoint doorway that leads, improbably, to one of New York's most extraordinary private bookstores.
Founded in 1999, High Valley Books is run out of Mr Bill Hall's living room and basement, and it is where fashion archivists, interior designers and set decorators go when they need the perfect print reference from 1963 or a magazine no one remembers.
Appointments are made via landline – [phone] – or Instagram DM. First-timers get a quiet tour. Regulars know to leave time for the basement, where the discoveries get stranger and better.
It is part archive dig, part conversation. Mr Hall might pull something you did not know to ask for. Or he might introduce you to someone across the room hunting something adjacent. Some books cost US$40. Some cost as much as a Vespa. Mr Hall knows which is which, and he will explain why – if you ask.
Astro Gallery of Gems, 417 Fifth Avenue, Midtown, Manhattan
A display case on the appointment-only floor of Astro Gallery of Gems.
PHOTO: HIROKO MASUIKE/NYTIMES
Astro Gallery of Gems bills itself as the world's largest gem and mineral shop. Upstairs, you can browse the vault-size geodes and sapphires. But the basement – by appointment only – is where things take a turn for the Jurassic.
This is where president and chief executive Dennis Tanjeloff stores his backroom full of prehistoric flex: a US$125,000 Odontopteryx tilapia skeleton (since sold), trilobites as big as house cats, meteorite slices and the kind of dino bones that end up in Gulf State palaces or private Colorado libraries.
It is a celebrity obsession too – he calls his buyers 'grown-up boys' who never got over the idea that dinosaurs were real. Among the best-known fossil collectors: American actors Brad Pitt, Nicolas Cage and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Mr Tanjeloff is part dealer, part historian and wholly unbothered by those who disapprove of his trade – not everyone loves the idea of rare fossils going to private collectors instead of museums.
His current selection, which ranges from US$24 for small ammonites to US$95,000 for a Tyrannosaurus rex tibia, comes from old collections, private digs and other dealers. 'You're not hurting a thing,' he says with a shrug. 'They're already extinct.'
Book ahead, ask for the fossil room and expect numbers that make you blink. If you do not leave with an ancient jawbone, you will at least understand why some people feel compelled to try. NYTIMES