“There’s a magic to New York, the serendipity of meeting people,” Komal Kehar muses. “I needed a place to work, but I realized that instead of just an office, it could be so much more.” The architect and interior designer didn’t have experience as a shopkeeper, but she had spent a decade designing retail interiors. So, when a space near her East Village apartment became available, she decided to jump on it. The result is her first decor boutique, Common Things.
Kehar soon decided to organize the boutique’s offerings around the color blue. “It’s amazing what this hue represents cross-culturally; it makes sense, because we all share a blue sky and ocean,” she says. “So, things in the shop are predominantly blue or neutrals that go with this color.”
Since its recent opening, Common Things has been continually stocked with Kehar’s beautiful curation of azure-colored pieces, but she plans to regularly change the shop’s emphasis. “I grew up as the child of immigrants and have a huge network,” she notes. “Common Things is about celebrating the way cultures around the world use similar materials, but in different ways.”
