• Neue Galerie

  1048 Fifth Ave., 212-628-6200

  Most museum shops are full of the same overfamiliar design classics that you can find almost anywhere these days. This German and Austrian art museum boasts a store with actual personality, selling original reproductions from design factories of turn-of-the-last-century Europe. There’s a modernist rigor about the pieces, to be sure—like an unbearably pure tumbler set by Alfred Loos or a subtly off-center Marianne Brandt Bauhaus teapot—but it’s balanced by an undercurrent of quirky, colorful energy. Josef Hoffmann in particular is the star here; the bold stripes of his tea service ($245 for a teapot) are almost voluptuous, and a silver jewelry box studded with square cushions ($2,880) is suavely ornate.

From the 2006 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine