A Breath of Fresh Air

Greenpoint Welcomes its Newest Neighbor, Open Air Modern
By Juliet Linderman

When it comes to aesthetics, Matt Singer doesn’t mess around. Blue-eyed, fluffy-haired and somewhat soft-spoken, Singer—a sculptor and printmaker by trade and education—is the proud owner of Open Air Modern at 606 Manhattan Avenue, a modern furniture showroom offering a selection of rare, out-of-print and valuable art, design and architecture books, in addition to an array of used paperback titles. In the works for a little over a month, Open Air Modern will open for business for the very first time on Saturday afternoon.

Singer plans to focus mostly on mid-century design, ranging from the 1950s to 1970s, characterized by natural wood and simple finishes.

The form and substance of so many of the art, architecture and design book the store will stock, when paired with Singer’s selection of furniture, will create a carefully-curated aesthetic experience that is, he says, completely intentional.

“I really subscribe to the modern notion of pairing things down to their basic essence,” Singer said of his taste and selection in both furniture and art-related book titles. “This is a small shop, I’m not trying to overload it with stuff; I am excited to cull these things out of the world and bring them into focus. And I find that my book clientele and my furniture clientele are very similar, they often overlap.”

While the shop could certainly be mistaken for a specialty store, Singer aims to be as approachable to the community as possible, and hopes that Open Air Modern will function as the go-to neighborhood used bookstore, in addition to a furniture showroom.

“I hope to be the kind of bookshop that has the cool design stuff, but also a place you can go if you want a copy of Moby Dick or Catcher in the Rye—a place you know you can come for your classics, and to have a solid selection of fiction titles—but don’t feel like going into the city. You can come by, grab a book and you’re off to the park to read it.”

Singer plans to also carry a variety of art and design-related publications, vintage stationary, postcards and photographs, in addition to solid, quality furniture—valued pieces that overtly go against “the overarching idea of a disposable society” that creeps into so many bedrooms and dens, offices and dining areas via ready-to-assemble Ikea wares.

Open Air Modern, which is Singer’s first shop, will host its official launch party on September 12th, though he is no rookie to the game: Open Air Modern has existed in the form of a website for nearly six months (www.openairmodern.com), and up until recently Singer managed and operated an outdoor market on Metropolitan Avenue, buying, selling and trading furniture and hard-to-find art books. The storefront is simply the next step for Singer: by opening a store, he hopes to encourage passersby to stop in, engage with the merchandise and maybe even learn of find something new.

“This is about discovery,” Singer said. “I’m offering books up to people who may not know who Alexander Calder is, but they can discover him. I like the idea of opening people up to things. When I buy books, I come across things I didn’t know about all the time. You can find all of these titles online, but on a website you can’t really see them. The website is for searching, the shop is for discovering.”