Same Old

Same Old is a Los Angeles design store selling collectible twentieth century furniture, lighting and objects by named designers, among them Gae Aulenti, Pierre Paulin, Gaetano Pesce and Frank Gehry. Stock is single pieces rather than lines, priced from $250 for a postmodern desk lamp to $8,400 for a sofa, and the showroom on S Santa Fe Ave is open by appointment on three days a week. The site is a Next.js front end drawing content from Sanity and commerce from Shopify.

Website Design

Two tones and one accent. The interface runs near black on off white with a mid grey for secondary text and a single sand tone used as a panel ground. Nothing else carries colour, so the only chroma on a page comes from the furniture photography.

Europa in two widths. Type is Europa for running text and Europa Condensed for compressed labels, both self hosted. Sizes stay small and even, and type does the hierarchy work in place of rules or boxes.

Controls written as brackets. Every action is set in square brackets rather than given a button: [ Back ], [ CLOSE ], [ Go to cart ], [ View Catalog ]. It reads like a directory listing and keeps the chrome flat.

Shopping Experience

A catalogue of twenty eight pieces. The grid holds twenty eight items filtered by All, Tables, Objects, Storage, Seating and Lighting. Cards give the full title and the price, so a Gae Aulenti 4854 chair for Kartell reads at $650 and an ABCD Sofa at $8,400.

The title carries the provenance. Product names are written as piece, designer, manufacturer and date: Power Play Chairs by Frank Gehry for Knoll, circa 1993. Attribution sits in the name rather than a specification table.

Two lines of detail. A product page gives a short paragraph, then Dims and Condition on one row, for example H 26″ x W 82.5″ x D 43″ and a grade of A-. There is no size or variant control, because each listing is one object.

Shipping quoted after the sale. The cart states that “Shipping will be quoted and invoiced separately” and asks buyers to request a quote by email first, adding that “If shipping costs exceed expectations, we will gladly refund your order!”

Brand Storytelling

A mission in one sentence. The store describes itself as celebrating “design from past, present, and future”, and that paragraph sits in an overlay panel reachable from every page rather than on a separate about page.

The archive does the talking. A dedicated Archive page lists pieces already sold as a plain table of piece, designer and year, with a List and Grid toggle. It runs several times longer than the live catalogue and works as a record of what the store has handled.

Notable Features

Rentals share the storefront. Furniture rentals and studio rentals each get their own contact address in the information panel, so three businesses are served from one site.

A headless stack. Sanity holds the product copy and page content, Shopify holds the commerce, Next.js renders both, and product imagery is served from the Shopify CDN.