Sandeep Salter

At the shop with the nightgown doyenne of Brooklyn Heights.

- MADELINE LEUNG COLEMAN

ON A RECENT Monday morning, Sandeep Salter walked quickly down Henry Street, rounded onto Atlantic Avenue, and pushed open the door to her shop Salter House. We wound past the marble café tables and the rows of horsehair brooms and frilly checked pillows and into the recent addition: a cozy extension to the store, opening November 7, out of which Salter will sell the clothes she designs. "I want this to feel like a bedroom," she said, showing me where hanging racks will line one wall, stocked with loose cotton dresses and floral corsets and coats that fasten with a bow. She sat down on a sofa (parabolic, taupe, antique, French), lifted her feet (white socks, lace) out of her loafers (brown, suede, low heel), crossed her legs under her, and flashed a big smile.

In the four years since she and her husband, Carson, opened this 700-square-foot store-which adjoins her gallery and shop Picture Room, where she sells artists' editions and originals and puts on exhibitions-Salter House has become a surprisingly persuasive argument for Salter's specific aesthetic. To enter is to imagine plastic was never invented; the home products are made of wood, straw, metal, cotton, and linen. The clothes are roomy, shirred, puff-sleeved, ruffle-hemmed, and more often than not modeled by Salter's artist-slash-model friends-Hailey Benton Gates, Maia Ruth Lee, Coco Baudelle-if not by Salter herself. Actor Bobbi Salvör Menuez worked the café counter for a while. Someone, inevitably, has a ribbon in their hair.