Step Inside Salon 94’s New Upper East Side Headquarters

Not long after the Frick Collection debuted its temporary new home at the Breuer building on Madison Avenue, art enthusiasts are about to get another reason to visit the Upper East Side. Tomorrow, Salon 94 will unveil its sprawling new headquarters (five stories and 17,500 square feet, to be exact) in a landmark Beaux Arts building on 89th Street, mere blocks away from founder Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn’s family’s townhouse, the gallery’s original location.

For the last decade, Salon 94 has largely shifted business downtown (its Freeman Alley gallery will continue showing exhibitions). Nonetheless, one of the impetuses for relocating its headquarters was the growth of its Salon 94 Design division, first launched in 2016. “It became very clear that the designers needed a dedicated space. Because of their work’s functional nature, this required a lot more finessing than my other galleries could provide,” Greenberg Rohatyn tells AD PRO. For the headquarters, Max Lamb constructed a tiled bathroom that will be on permanent display; Gaetano Pesce designed a Ballet Table for Greenberg Rohatyn’s office; and Philippe Malouin created a monumental glass chandelier to hang from the top of the building’s original stairwell.

Striking architectural elements, like the staircase, curved ceilings, and wood herringbone floors, caused Greenberg Rohatyn to fall in love with the building after a year of searching for a location. With its remarkably high ceilings and grand proportions, the site, built by architect Ogden Codman between 1913 to 1915, had never in fact been used as a house. Instead, it had been put to good use as an entertaining, exhibition, and studio space for arts philanthropist Archer Huntington and sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington.

During the renovation process, Greenberg Rohatyn and longtime architect partner Rafael Viñoly decided to keep both old and new elements in order to honor the building’s past while modernizing it. In Greenberg Rohatyn’s office, for example, the original wood paneling was replaced with a custom system in which art can be hung. The two preserved the decadent original dining room and its marble checkered floors (now called the Stone Room), but juxtaposed it with surrounding stark, white-walled galleries. “I wanted it to feel incredibly sci-fi, like you had extreme experiences between going from one room to the next,” explains Greenberg Rohatyn.

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Salon 94’s inaugural trilogy of shows capitalizes on the building’s diverse spaces. They also further evidence the wide-ranging talents that the gallery champions. In conjunction with MoMA PS1’s new Niki de Saint Phalle exhibition, Salon 94 pays homage to the avant-garde artist with “Joy Revolution,” featuring both her large iconic sculptures (two of which are 2,400 pounds) and domestically scaled works. “She has always been on our opening-show list because we love her sense of optimism and joy,” Greenberg Rohatyn says, adding that they also wanted to present an artist working now in New York to celebrate what will (hopefully) be the dwindling number of local cases of COVID-19. “Derrick Adams: Style Variations” brings together 10 new large-scale portraits that the artist made at his Bed-Stuy studio during the pandemic.

“Whereas Niki de Saint Phalle was very radical in the 1960s, Derrick represents the voice of today, or what we call ‘black radical joy.’” Rounding out the exhibitions is “Takuro Kuwata: Zungurimukkuri (Roly Poly),” installed in the ground-floor Brick Room, which features new ceramic sculptures that explore and reinvent the ancient ritual of the Japanese tea ceremony.

While the headquarters currently offers 10,000 square feet of exhibition space, construction will continue over the next year to add offices, a library, and ground-floor shop curated by fashion designer Duro Olowu. Greenberg Rohatyn promises that store will truly be “a cabinet of curiosities,” just like the rest of the building. Salon 94 will also house a café that artist Tom Sachs is designing. “I believe walking into a white-box space shouldn’t be a silent experience,” says Greenberg Rohatyn. “I really do think that having a conversation, having an experience, is part of the pleasure of art.”