A chair in a room is not the same as a chair on a plinth. Design is understood differently when allowed to enter the life of a space.

This is the premise behind The Residence, Assembly Line’s latest presentation inside 144 Vanderbilt, a three-story townhouse in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, with architecture by SO–IL and interiors by General Assembly. Led by Sarah Zames and Colin Stief, Assembly Line operates somewhere between gallery, showroom, and lived interior. The project marks the first collaboration between Assembly Line and Kalon, offering a rare opportunity to encounter the Los Angeles studio’s furniture at the scale of a home.

“For us, they function more as immersive showrooms that allow people to experience independent designers in context,” Zames explains. In this setting, design is understood through inhabitation rather than display.

The distinction matters. Rather than isolate objects as singular works, The Residence places them in conversation with architecture, material, light, and use. It is not a neutral container, nor a conventional model home. It is a curatorial experiment in context: a way of understanding how furniture, objects, and rooms change one another.

The house gives that experiment a particularly charged setting. Behind its scalloped pink concrete façade, exposed concrete ceilings, natural oak floors, broad glass, and shifting daylight create a framework of contrasts: raw and refined, cool and warm, solid and soft. General Assembly’s interiors do not smooth those tensions away. They draw them out, using color, texture, and material depth to make the architecture feel more intimate, more tactile, more lived in.

Within this setting, Kalon’s work becomes one of the clearest expressions of the format. Often encountered in fragments — a chair in a room, a table on a terrace, a bed in a private interior — the studio’s pieces gather at The Residence into something larger: a survey across collections, materials, and rooms, not as a linear product presentation, but as a domestic vocabulary. Rugosa brings low, generous walnut forms into the living areas. Element’s Douglas Fir and brushed aluminum planes sit closer to the language of the building itself. Cube + Void introduces weight, pause, and negative space. Outside, on terraces and balconies where concrete planes extend the living spaces into open air, Material Studies I shifts with the light, its bronzed glass and powder-coated aluminum drawing the building’s distinctive surfaces and sky into its own. In each environment, the pieces settle into the space around them: livable, quietly integrated, yet defining.

Seen this way, the collections reveal something harder to grasp one object at a time. Kalon’s work has never depended on a single signature silhouette. A bed, a table, a cube, a chair, a shelf: each piece remains distinct, but together they describe a larger vocabulary of proportion, material, restraint, and craft.

That is the intelligence of The Residence as a curatorial format. It does not ask furniture to perform as art, nor does it reduce it to lifestyle. It allows design to be understood through proximity and atmosphere: how a surface catches light, how wood warms concrete, how textile softens a room, how an object changes when placed among other things meant to be lived with.

In that sense, The Residence is less a showroom than a proposition: design understood not in isolation, but in relation to the rooms, materials, and rituals that give it meaning.

The Residence is on view in Fort Greene, Brooklyn through the summer, open by appointment.

Explore the pieces from The Residence.

• Photography: Ben Dehaan