Atelier Jolie is a silly place on paper. When Angelina Jolie first got the lease on Basquiat’s old studio on Great Jones, she introduced the venture as “a place to have fun. To create your own designs with freedom. To discover yourself.” Which, sure. All these months later, what’s happening inside seems to be part store, part café, and part adult-arts-and-crafts workshop, as though a traditional atelier and a WeWork had a baby. If you want to upcycle or futz with your clothing, you can do so there with all the equipment they have on hand for a flat fee. (Indeed, as I walked in, one person came in behind me with a pair of beat-up sneakers. “I’m hoping to paint these for a while,” he said, heading down to the basement.) If you want to buy something from Jolie’s collaboration with the brand Chloé for an easy $4,000, you can do that, too. If you want to work on your laptop out of the back café, a well-lit little space full of actual books and sketch pads and a working piano, well, there’s room for that as well. After the kind security guard immediately ushered me past the clothing section (my budget wearing me, I guess), I ordered a cortado ($6) and sat and read for a bit. Customers wandered in and out muttering in French. On the wall sat a handful of kids’ drawings, charming and sloppy and colorful. The store was strangely unpretentious, quiet, and welcoming.
But it is also part of a wave of atelier saturation. Wander around Soho, Noho, or Williamsburg and you’ll be confronted with small business after small business, any one of them a maison or a studio, but it’s atelier, in particular, that seems to have exploded over the past few years. And while the word suggests a workshop, a place of trying and failing, for all intents and purposes in American store-naming culture, it’s synonymous with a boutique where you’ll likely need to be buzzed in. The products range from furniture (Atelier Design and Atelier Interior Design) to fashion (Wedding Atelier) to real estate (the Atelier Condo NYC). And they are everywhere. We have reached something like ateliermania.
Step out of Atelier Jolie and cross through Bowery to East 4th Street and you can get a haircut at L’Atelier De Laurie. Turn west, instead, toward Soho and you will discover Atelier Management, Atelier Beauté Chanel — a “self-guided” “beauty workshop” — and the showroom for the Parisian light-and-art studio Atelier Alain Ellouz in a one-mile radius. In the sweet in-between of Soho and Tribeca, just around the corner from the Roxy Hotel, is Form Atelier, a furniture, lighting, and art-based store. The space was cozy, and I was encouraged to look around as much as I’d like. The chairs all sat low to the ground; the lamps had spindly necks. An Olmec mask is available for a mere $11,500. Wearing a backpack, I felt as close as I’ve ever felt to being a literal bull in a china shop. I moved on, heading to Brooklyn instead of stopping at Cafe Atelier & Darling Moon Flower for a rose latte and $350 bouquet of peonies.
Williamsburg, perhaps unsurprisingly, is particularly rife with ateliers, from the Atelier Apartments — where the going rate for a studio is $3,700 and up, but at least you get in-unit laundry — to Atelier Beauté, a skin-care shop in which the press-shy sales associate told me it was “really just a normal store.” (Not to be confused with Atelier Beauté Chanel.) Then there is Atelier Mira, an optical boutique and lifestyle shop on Grand Street. It is full of the kinds of tchotchkes (hexagonal coasters, art books, sculptures) that would feel at home at any Williamsburg Airbnb tagged “Superhost,” and the glasses on display range from the playful (hot-pink clear plastic frames) to the baffling (a set of frames that seemed deliberately broken and held together with string?). A friend tried on a pair of white sunglasses — very Old Hollywood — that would have set her back $800.
The nearby Grand Street Atelier Eva — the other is on Havemeyer — is the rare spot that doesn’t require a buzzing in and is replete with natural light, big stone sculptures, and plenty of plants. There’s a conference table up toward the front, where people could feasibly do work listening to the hum of tattoo needles, though that space was empty. The location also hosts the occasional art salon and figure-drawing class, and before I left, the most recent copy of the atelier’s newsletter (a glossy bound document) was handed over to me with gentle eagerness.
Not even half a mile away, I also met Jean-Paul Viollet, who runs Atelier Viollet on Driggs Avenue. An atelier atelier. Viollet comes from a long line of French woodworkers and opened his Brooklyn-based furniture atelier in 1986. There, working alongside his wife and son and “about 12 others,” they craft anything from single pieces of furniture to whole interiors for people mostly based in New York but also on the West Coast and in Florida. Of all the city’s ateliers I went into, Atelier Viollet undoubtedly had the most expensive, inaccessible pieces for my budget, but the shop carries little pretension or snobbery. “We try to keep a good vibe,” Viollet told me. The desks and cabinets are made of mahogany, mica, gypsum, and shagreen, which comes from stingrays. As for the neighborhood’s swell of not-ateliers next door, Viollet was nonplussed. “I think they want to conjure the feeling of a workshop,” he said with a shrug.