NOW OPEN: MUJI's Fifth New York Store Hits Cooper Square Today

It may have been the disgusting weather this morning that made the Press Preview for MUJI's new store on Cooper Square a bit more subdued than one would have expected. Of course, this in New York's fifth store from the Japanese chain, so we are all pretty familiar with what they have to offer by now, and yet the company has made each store a bit different.

In a certain sense, it's a surprise that it took Muji so long to get to the East Village, which, for years has been home to a number of smaller restaurants and stores specializing in Japanese food and products that are harder to find elsewhere. The new Muji store is a few doors away from a Japanese barbecue, so it fits in the neighborhood just fine, especially on a block that has recently become home to some dramatic, futuristic architecture. Muji is not, however in one of those buildings, but in a more traditional sort of space that makes it the first New York store to offer two levels of shopping. On the street level, there are all the familiar offerings from clothing to home and kitchen items to ever more of the brand's fascinating pens and paper products. Downstairs, however, holds an expanded offering of the brand's furniture. Browse around long enough and find yourself longing to live in an environment defined by simple, functional wooden furniture and walls filled with pristine stacks of polypropylene shelves and drawers. As we have mentioned before, part if the appeal of Muji's furniture is that it is scaled to small living spaces, a quality that any New York Apartment dweller can appreciate.

We hadn't had a good browse around Muji for a little while, and there are always ingenious new gadgets and clever items to discover. We were kindly gifted with a Silicone Ice Ball Maker —designed for those who prefer a single sphere of ice— inside a special edition of the store's re-usable canvas My Bag made just for the store that will be distributed to the first 1,000 customers. Check out our gallery below for a look inside the new store.

MUJI Cooper Square 52 Cooper Square between East 6th & 7th Streets, East Village

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