For the past five years, Stòffa operated a private salon on the second floor of an unassuming building in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, an “if-you-know-you-know” purveyor of casual made-to-measure menswear in high-quality fabrics. (New customers, as the story goes, have fanatically dispensed with their entire wardrobe to make room for Stòffa garments they plan to keep for decades.) The brand’s founders, Agyesh Madan and Nick Ragosta, who met while working for Italian label Isaia, were itching for a more public-facing store to coincide with their recent foray into ready-to-wear. Its newly opened flagship, a 2,000-square-foot Grand Street boutique awash in earth tones and vintage furniture, feels like a true arrival.
Cream-colored paint and original terrazzo floors strike a meditative tone, echoed by a sparse shop floor outfitted with ikebana-style flowers, earthen ceramics, and vintage furniture lined in lamb suede. Linen lace curtains beckon to the store’s rear private rooms, where handcrafted dark-stained ash cabinets and a like-minded table by Studio POA nod to the label’s specialty in made-to-measure outerwear. That’s where tailoring appointments take place; Madan and Ragosta can spend upwards of eight hours per day working directly with clients, and it accounts for a majority of their business, so the environs needed to foster focus and serenity. A dramatic skylight shrouding the room in calming streams of sunlight gets the job done—and may illuminate some intricacies in menswear you never before noticed.
