It’s 4 p.m. on a Thursday in Manhattan. The flight’s in a couple of hours, and a skincare store on Broadway that looks — from the outside, at least — like a very calm building with very good lighting. So I stopped.
It’s SKIN1004’s first flagship store in the US, spanning nearly 10,000 square feet across two floors at 470 Broadway, two floors at 470 Broadway, and the entire interior is one continuous sculpture carved out of wood. The architecture firm LMTLS Architecture took out the second floor so the lobby opens into a double-height space that can host events, then let the ceiling sink down toward the register and rise again into a chamber at the back, so the room contracts and expands as you walk.
That wood is the whole point. LMTLS calls it the Nature Wall: layers of ultra-light MDF, each 2 inches thick and banded in stain-colored maple veneer, stacked into a meandering mass that runs the length of the store. It holds the seating, the product displays, and the checkout counter, all of them. One contiguous piece instead of three separate fixtures, and it’s shaped like an erosion valley you’d actually see in a canyon. The stepped edges mimic eroded sandstone, with the horizontal striations making the layers of geological time visible. The whole thing was fabricated by Gilbert and Adirondack Studios, who milled each layer to profile before assembly.
SoHo shopfronts get skinny, so they installed a nine-foot-tall mirror plane running parallel to the wall, from front door to back wall of the store. It picks up the millwork over its full length, doubling the topography and pushing the apparent depth well beyond the actual footprint. It’s also why the space photographs so much deeper than it is.
The lighting is Cooledge, set into the ceiling and the casing so it comes out warm and diffuse rather than harsh. There’s a brushed-metal-clad column that raises the brand mark into some glowing amorphous shape overhead. Small details, but they’re the difference between a store that feels like a hallway and a store that feels like it belongs somewhere natural.
The back chamber is where the pace slows down. The products get presented more like objects in a gallery than conveniences on pegboard. There’s a photo booth framed by a 12-foot mirror, and a brand film looping endlessly on an LED wall. A brand built on ingredients drawn from untouched landscapes has essentially figured out how to live inside a constructed one. That’s a good complete sentence, let it land.
The 2-Minute Fix
You’re passing through SoHo or you have a layover day: take the photo in the back chamber and post it with a story that says something true about you. The mirror wall does the composition. Then top up your sheet-mask supply while you’re there, because nothing gets through a carry-on like a box of SKIN1004 masks, and your future in-flight self will thank you.
One more thing worth knowing: the store at 470 Broadway is open daily from 11 a.m. until 8 p.m. No reservation needed, just show up with your travel bag a little lighter than it comes out.
If you’re in the city, drop a note with what you’d grab first. I read the interesting ones.
Glow doesn’t wait — and neither do you.