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Image of a cafe installed in a gallery with orange furniture and metallic walls
Crosby Studio’s Web-3 Café pop-up installation on view at Paris’s Galerie Charraudeau through April 4. Courtesy Crosby Studios

March 23, 2022

Crosby Studio’s Latest Collection Will Include an Interior Design Video Game

The New York and Paris-based designer Harry Nuriev’s Web-3 Café installation embraces a bitmap aesthetic in anticipation of a new Crosby Studios Video Game.

By: Osman Can Yerebakan

Crosby Studios has a way with pixels, but perhaps not in a way you’d expect. With its latest project, founder and designer Harry Nuriev aim to “challenge the evolution of high-resolution imagery” through a new collection of furniture as well as an upcoming Crosby Studios Video Game. Web-3 Café, which Nuriev co-presents with Gaia Repossi of her eponymous jewelry house, is a pop-up installation of painted MDF stools, chairs, and side tables arranged in a functioning café setting at Paris’s Galerie Charraudeau through April 4.

The furniture presents a humorous nod to an undesirable “low-res” aesthetic quality in a picture-perfect, image-driven culture. Forming various geometric compositions in Nuriev’s signature neon color palette reflects the designer’s interest in pixels’ optic richness. “They’re not just accidental shapes but rather codes of an image. A pixel is like a cell—there is something human in its translation into a larger image which I find beautiful,” he says. The furniture collection is also the launching pad for Nuriev’s interior design-themed video game which be powered by Meta Development Agency and released on The Sandbox when the virtual experience platform launches later this year.

rendering of a cafe in a video game with orange furniture and metallic walls
Rendering of the Crosby Studios Video Game. Courtesy Crosby Studios

The game will allow participants to design interiors with furniture pieces from Crosby Studios, and in return, pixelated versions of some of signature pieces will be reproduced in varieties of colors throughout the year to interject the digital into the physical world. Drawing inspiration from video games such as The Sims, the designer explains, “I was constantly building homes rather than creating characters on this game, which made me figure this could be an entertaining way to experience design.”

a rendering of a new pixelated furniture collection from Crosby studios
Rendering of Crosby Studio’s video game inspired collection. Courtesy Crosby Studios.

Nuriev is known for championing boldly monochromatic interiors in metallic, purple, or green hues, but his new venture signals his foray into new colors and motifs. “For the first time, I am giving orange a chance,” he says. Another bold step for Nuriev is leopard print, which he admits to be his new design obsession. “I want to include this pattern in environments where design is expected to be very minimal and clean.”

Obsession is in fact a keyword for Nuriev whose design flirts with the viewer through a sense of contemporary sensuality in disarming installations. Whether the metallic reflective bedroom he designed for the most recent Design Miami/ or his rendition of an elevator through furniture in the same fair’s Basel edition last fall, theatricality and mystery determine Nuriev’s aesthetic philosophy.

“The video game is my new environment,” Nuriev explains. Testing the waters in the real world with a physical rendition of the game’s café allows him to observe our relationship between URL and IRL, especially through the inherently tactile practice of furniture design when the metaverse is rapidly becoming an experimental platform for architecture and design.

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