E-commerce website takes 41K sf sublease at Terminal Stores for showroom

UPDATED, Aug. 20, 1:55 p.m.: 1stdibs.com, an online marketplace for high-end interior design items, signed a sublease to take more than 40,000 square feet for a new showroom at the Terminal Stores in West Chelsea.

The venture-capital backed e-commerce company signed a four-year sublease with electronics manufacturer Flextronics for a little more than 41,000 square-feet at the massive warehouse complex, sources told The Real Deal.

With its office headquarters in Greenwich Village at 51 Astor Place, 1stdibs.com will relocate the gallery it has at the New York Design Center building at 200 Lexington Avenue to the Terminal Stores location, which will open in January.

Financial terms of the deal were not available. 1stdibs CEO David Rosenblatt told TRD it’s important that the company’s offline experience is “tightly integrated with our online experience.”

“For instance, the new showroom will offer the ability for shoppers to scan an item to instantly display that item on their phone, see detailed product information, and save that item for future viewing,” he.

Founded in 2001 by former Sotheby’s International Realty broker Michael Bruno, 1stdibs has received funding from Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Spark Capital and Alibaba. The company was the first tenant to sign a lease at Edward Minskoff’s speculative 51 Astor Place office building when it inked a deal for a full, 42,000-square-foot floor in 2013.

A Newmark Knight Frank team of David Falk, Gregory Wang and Eric Cagner represented 1stdibs in the sublease.

Terminal Stores, meanwhile, is entering the next stage of its transformation from a dilapidated warehouse to a trendy destination on Manhattan’s emerging Far West Side.

L&L Holding Company and Normandy Real Estate are in contract to buy the full-block, 1.2 million-square-foot property from GreenOak Real Estate and Waterfront New York for $900 million.

The new owners plan to convert about 500,000 square feet of storage space into offices.

Other tenants at the property include auction houses such as Hutter Auction Galleries and Liveauctioneers.com, as well as companies like Uber and L’Oréal USA.