Vivavi Teams With Sheldrake to Open Green Furniture Store at Riverhouse

Josh Dorfman and our friends at Vivavi have partnered with The Sheldrake Organization to open an Eco Pop-Up Store at the developer’s Riverhouse condo in Battery Park City. As you’ll recall, the project is aiming for a LEED Platinum rating and recently earned significant green press after Leonardo Di Caprio purchased an apartment in the 32-story, 264-unit tower. The store, which is a fully-furnished Unit 8D, adjacent to the Riverhouse sales center, is open to the public 7 days a week, and features pieces from 18 different green-minded designers, including Brave Space, Modern Bamboo, and Animavi, as well as a Team 7 dining room and office furnishings from Knu Furniture. As Mr. Dorfman explained in a press release, the purpose of the partnership is to assist “Riverhouse residents and visitors [in discovering] easy, stylish and convenient ways to further green their lifestyles. They don’t need to leave the building in order to be introduced to cutting-edge sustainable products, emerging design trends, and home innovations underway.” Vivavi is calling the Pop-Up Store the first of its kind within a residential building in New York City, and it’s certainly the first to exclusively feature green living products.

I spent an afternoon a few weeks ago wandering through Battery Park City’s maze of green buildings and was really impressed with the Riverhouse. Its design team is a cast of all-stars- the exterior of the building was executed by Polshek Partnership Architects (the Clinton Presidential Center and the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Museum of Natural History), layouts and space planning from Ismael Leyva Architects, and interior finishes and common areas, including the lobby, by David Rockwell’s Rockwell Group. Green features include a geothermal heating and cooling system, photovoltaic cells, low-E double-pane windows, a green roof, and Energy Star appliances. Twenty percent of building materials are recycled and forty percent of the total project materials were procured from local manufacturers. In addition, at a cost of $1 million, the building’s wastewater treatment plant will recycle water for the HVAC system’s cooling tower, and the installation of 60kW microturbines will allow cogeneration of electricity and heat. In addition to the Pop Up Store, one of the building’s commercial units will house specialty organic café City Bakery.

Mr. Dorfman is Vivavi’s CEO, author of The Lazy Environmentalist: Your Guide to Easy, Stylish, Green Living, and host of the Sirius satellite radio program of the same name.

• Vivavi Opens Modern Green Furniture Store (LE)
• Riverhouse (gbNYC)

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