Italian design company Molteni Group has moved into a new home in New York, designed by Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen and featuring a grand walnut staircase.
The Molteni Group Flagship Store at 160 Madison Avenue, close to several design showrooms, opened last week to coincide with the city's NYCxDesign festival. It marks a major upgrade for the company, which previously occupied a much smaller space in Soho.

Van Duysen ? who serves as creative director for the family of brands that includes Molteni&C, Dada and Unifor ? designed the interior with a nod to the company's Italian heritage while following his usual pared-back aesthetic.
Starting with a "soulless box", he transformed the two-storey space into a series of rooms that he described as a contemporary interpretation of a historic grand palazzo.
"When you come in the shop, you feel like you are not in New York any more; that you are in an Italian environment," Van Duysen told Dezeen. "You can see that in the use of materials, the travertine on the floors and the monumental arcades."
One of the challenges was how to incorporate the building's huge structural columns into the design. Rather than try to fit them into the partitions, the architect turned them into statement features.

"The columns were very obstructive when we started to work on the plan, because we didn't know how we could incorporate them in an aesthetic way," said Van Duysen. "But all of a sudden...