Find your creative space at 101 Greene Street

The Sonos store that opened on Greene Street this month is the brand’s first brick-and-mortar location. Well, sort of. The 4,200-square-foot shop—already drawing crowds eager to treat their eyes and ears to one-of-a-kind features like the magnificent 300-speaker Wall of Sound at the rear—was built, to scale, in a warehouse in Southern California before construction even began in SoHo. There was so much the team had to get just right. The ingenious mix of Scandi-chic design and perforated, sound-diffusing surfaces; the complex Sonos speaker system pumping in tunes at a perfectly controlled, and perfectly consistent, volume; that eye-boggling Wall of Sound. And then there were the Listening Rooms.

101G, as the Sonos team calls their first retail space, is less a shop than a mini village dedicated to the art of sound. Walk in and you see a row of little homes, or Listening Rooms, flanked against the south wall like luxurious tents, their soundproof glass fronts revealing delightful and chic interiors. Each is themed, some lightly, some elaborately, and equipped with Sonos play:1 to play:5 speakers and subs; one wall suggests a kitchen, another a study, and the rear functions as the living room. The idea is for consumers to enter and experience Sonos’s wireless speakers as they would in their own homes—just pick a tune using the touchscreen module and turn up the volume (go to max and you’ll get a fun surprise, trust us).

“We’ve taken the dressing room and the display room and smashed them together,” says Whitney Walker, GM of Stores for Sonos. And he’s right. 101G is a shop unlike any other in downtown Manhattan. It’s an experience, each Listening Room a place to be inspired by great sound and art, much of which has been drawn from the minds of local artists. We can see it becoming a place to hang out, and to be inspired, as much as to shop. Here we detail what each Listening Room has to offer, so that you can find a creative space that’s perfect for you.