On Thursday, crews were still fighting a fire in a massive Red Hook warehouse.
Photo: Lanoba Design
The owners of Lanoba Design closed up their Red Hook shop on Wednesday evening without much thought, turning out the lights and locking the door on about 8,000 square feet and 900 pieces of vintage furniture they’d picked out by hand — tall sideboards and low bookshelves; a rare lounge chair by the designer Johannes Andersen; and a 12-foot-long dining table they had restored to bring out the fine dark lines in the old teak. By morning, everything was gone. “The tragedy is these pieces lived 70 years and were ready to live another 70 years,” said David Singh, who co-owns the business with his partner, Lars Balderskilde. “Some are so unique that there are maybe a handful in the world left.” Maybe.
The showroom as it once was.
Photo: Lanoba Design
The first texts about the fire came from their building manager at about 3 a.m.: images of flames. The fire had broken out before midnight on the third floor of the handsome brick warehouse at the end of Van Brunt Street, which along with Lanoba Design housed the offices of architects, a community newspaper, and dozens of artists prepping for an open-studio event next month. They have little hope of finding anything to save. What wasn’t damaged by fire itself may have been destroyed when the roof collapsed, or by the water that was pumped in from the harbor at a rate of 50,000 gallons a minute. The FDNY said the flames may have spread quickly due to the age of the heavy timber that made up the building’s structure. When Singh and Balderskilde made it to the shop, they saw water flowing — “Niagara Falls coming out of the building,” Singh said. What hadn’t been charred was damaged beyond repair by the flooding. “We do not have one piece of inventory that can be salvageable,” Singh said. Not even their tools. He estimates a loss in the millions. “This is a 100 percent wipeout.” He hasn’t been sleeping: “I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about a piece I had forgotten about, and I can’t go back to sleep. Something that is so rare is just gone.”
Fire damage inside the shop.
Photo: Lanoba Design
The two partners founded Lanoba in the kitchen of their apartment in 2015, when a surge of post–Mad Men interest in Scandinavian mid-century modern furniture gave them the idea. Balderskilde, who is Danish, traveled to Denmark, picking up treasures from families letting go of old desks and dining sets. They learned to restore furniture and upgraded from their kitchen to a warehouse in Jersey City. Business kept rolling even through the pandemic — when their desks flew out the door, as remote workers upgraded home offices. Most customers were in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, so they went shopping for a space in the city and fell for the warehouse within ten minutes of seeing it. Balderskilde remembered thinking how the thin, honey-colored furniture might contrast against the dark, raw space with stone walls and exposed beams. They opened there in June of last year and the business saw a 50 percent jump in sales, offloading 3,500 items in its first 12 months. “We became, probably, the biggest vendor in Vintage Modern Danish Design,” said Balderskilde.
The shop sourced items directly from homes in Denmark. Lanoba Design.
The shop sourced items directly from homes in Denmark. Lanoba Design.
News of the fire moved fast, and messages of support soon followed. They’ve been trying to respond to all of them from their apartment, even as they navigate insurance claims, start a GoFundMe, reimburse customers whose pieces were destroyed, and pay the last bills to their suppliers and delivery contractors. Balderskilde was set to fly to Denmark next month, but he’ll stay in New York instead to focus on the work at hand: what to do with a container that arrived on Wednesday and has nowhere to unload. Obviously they are looking for a new space — no easy task, especially since they hope the next spot might be larger, Singh said: “We were a little squeezed in Red Hook.”
As they mourn the financial hit to the business they built together, they are also mourning what was essentially an archive that drew in gawkers like me who might never buy a $1,200 telephone bench but would come by every so often just to take pleasure in the beautiful showroom. Balderskilde was happy to speak about the stories behind designs, or designers, like a museum docent: “This is my cultural heritage.” They treated the pieces like artwork — because, really, they were. And on the rare occasions that Singh would elbow a mirror or knock the vases used to decorate the store, he would find himself in tears. “I would always want to cry because that was the original piece.”