People sometimes stop into Kim Soss’s store, Arrow, and think they’ve wandered into someone’s living room. “I’ve had people walk into the store and go, ‘Do you live here?’” she says. She doesn’t, but she might as well. The carefully placed modernist furniture in the small storefront showroom was all handpicked by the proprietor herself, who often can be found sitting at her desk knitting.
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Arrow, which opened in November, is the latest step in a career devoted largely to midcentury design. Soss dates her interest in old things to when she was just 12 and begging her mother to drop her off at flea markets near their Tennessee home. Though she says her family didn’t particularly share her interest, she remembers them having some modernist pieces that drew attention from friends. “There was an Eero Saarinen for Knoll dining room set,” she says, and draws a little sketch of a table that looks like something out of Disney’s 50s vision of Tomorrowland. “Kids would come over to my house and look at me like I was nuts.”
Walking around the store, Soss points out the workmanship on a suede and leather Gucci bag from the 70s and the innovative metal clasps on a Bonnie Cashin coat. She stops at a very loungey low-slung chair produced by M. Singer & Sons, a company that had a showroom in the Merchandise Mart in the 50s and 60s. Soss suspected that it had been the work of a well-known Italian designer of the time, Carlo de Carli. “A member of the Singer family was kind enough to do a little research for me and help me figure it out,” she says. He confirmed Soss’s hunch. Next she points out a tiny wire chair perched on a table. “This darlin’ little chair, it’s signed by Harry Bertoia, who’s somebody I’m very taken with,” Soss says. “In the early 50s he designed a series of chairs, and this is a nice early one that they did for a limited time, produced in a child size. They call them baby Bertoias.”
–Heather Kenny
