Meet The Titans Of Taste

The Philosopher King

Murray Moss, FOUNDER AND OWNER, MOSS

Walking into Murray Moss's celebrated downtown Manhattan housewares store, moss, is like walking into a museum. There are pristine white walls and objects--from Delft pottery to designer toilet-paper holders--in locked glass cases. Name cards identify an item's maker and date of origin. Handrails keep visitors at a distance. do not touch signs are everywhere. (OK, most of them are on T shirts worn by the store's employees--a little retail-design humor, ha ha.) On the downstairs level, there's even a giant chair by Frank Gehry made of corrugated cardboard that appeared in the Guggenheim's retrospective on the famed architect--an actual museum piece. But then Moss slides open its case. "Wanna test it out?" he asks. "It's surprisingly comfortable." Try getting away with that at the Guggenheim.

When Moss opened his store in SoHo nine years ago, he put a 1958 Bruno Munari steel garbage can in the window just to make a point to gallery-hopping passersby: design is everywhere--and everything. (And that good humor is a valuable complement to good taste.) "I don't make anything. I don't design anything," he says. "No one needs me to explain what a saltshaker is. It's my job to tell you why it's more than that."

Give Moss five minutes and he'll convince you that a single object can change your life. For instance, the $70 wineglass he's holding--a 1917 design by Austrian master Josef Hoffmann, made of ultrathin muslin glass. "This is a proposal from a designer as to what the world would be like if it was more perfect: a perfect world reduced to a glass," says Moss. "I imagine that Hoffmann felt perfection would be to have the thinnest possible barrier between your lips and the liquid--that's why the glass is so thin. It also requires incredible delicacy. What happens when you go from a normal glass to this is, it modifies your behavior. You become more graceful. And that's an extraordinary thing to get for $70."

Hooked on Classics