Hasta La Ideas

This is the tenth and final post in our interview series with influential I.D. curators, retailers and creative directors. Yesterday, we talked to the Cooper-Hewitt’s design curator, Ellen Lupton.

Jamie Gray can’t pinpoint the moment he fell in love with design. His interests quickly shifted from collecting midcentury pieces to following the new ideas and materials being explored by contemporary designers. Matter, the design shop he founded in 2003 to showcase that work, is now a fixture of New York’s design scene, and Gray is widely known for his discerning eye. MatterMade, the shop’s in-house line, was developed expressly to champion American designers, and to prove that small-scale production—and real design for living—could succeed. With this year’s collection, MatterMade focused on a single designer for the first time, releasing a line of furniture and lighting by Roman & Williams.

How do you find out about new designers?

New designers come to Matter in every imaginable way. I’m immersed in the design community locally, nationally and internationally, so people come to me through other designers, introductions and recommendations. I follow the industry via blogs, magazines and periodicals. I’m always intrigued by what’s happening, what’s current.

Elle Decoration UK is probably my favorite magazine, because they feature the type of work Matter looks for, but there are so many others: Surface, Dwell, Wallpaper, World of Interiors. Online I’m all over the map. I’m always checking Sight Unseen because I think Jill [Singer] and Monica [Khemsurov] are constantly curating and finding interesting new work and talented young designers and creators. David John, who runs You Have Been Here Sometime, puts together a really beautiful blog. There’s also Architizer, Yatzer and, of course, Core77. And the list goes on.

I also receive cold calls, or more specifically, cold e-mails. We receive a lot of work via e-mail, all of which I look through with excitement and enthusiasm. Maybe one in a hundred I will respond or relate to. It’s not even that all the work is good or bad; it’s that the process of curating, or the process of beginning a new project, is such a personal endeavor. Occasionally I’ll open an e-mail and really respond to somebody’s work and I’ll introduce myself.

The Matter store in New York

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