Rivian Sets Up at New York City’s High Line

From iconic vehicle design to a reinvented customer experience

Michael Frank

5 July 2023

Rivian’s senior director of facilities design, Denise Cherry, has a lot of experience digesting the ethos of a company and turning it into the face the world will see. Prior to working at Rivian she cofounded a Bay Area firm called Assembly Design Studio, where she helped create multiple venues for Uber, including in California and Amsterdam. There, she was also involved in far more public design, like a revamp of Detroit’s Roosevelt Park. It’s not really a mystery, then, why she’s so excited to see Rivian create an environment just below NYC’s High Line, at 15th Street in Manhattan, which is a kind of fusion between the beloved linear park and some of the sparer offices she’s spearheaded.

“It’s very intentionally a shell,” Cherry says about what Rivian’s created. “It’s less defined. It comes to life with people inside, and it’s very deliberately not ostentatious, or showy, because it’s truly about the connection between our people and our community.” How that vibe manifests is nearly like the way you’d experience a children’s museum. 

Inside, visitors do find a few Rivians. During our visit, these include a gray R1T and a white R1S. But much of the 5,000 square feet are given over to quadrants. In one, there’s an industrial table with reclaimed Danish stools loosely placed nearby. Amble from there to an upright display made of sustainably harvested plywood and you’ll find paint samples as large as dinner plates, the better to hand around to friends or take across the room to the floor-to-ceiling window to see how this car color will look in daylight. Or grab a hunk of equally (and intentionally) tactile carpet or seating sampling and bring both to the window, too. 

“Maybe 80, 90% of people have no experience with EVs,” Tony Caravano, Cherry’s partner, explains. “People are hungry to see and touch and experience these,” Cherry adds. The idea, then, is to demystify not only by having the cars themselves on display, but also by letting people walk up and grab some element of what might be incorporated into your own personal ride. And, crucially, both explain, to do so without keeping the experiential aspect behind lock and key, as you’d expect at a traditional car dealer. 

“We want you to feel like it’s a place where you can bring your kids and let them run around,” Cherry emphasizes, noting why everything in the space is deliberately tactile, and why there are even step stools at children’s height, so they can grab them and use them to get up to displays. A great example of that is a wall of old-school Viewmasters that were retrofitted with slideshows of Rivians. Cherry didn’t want a vibe that felt like it had rules, especially for children. “Are you going to be holding your kid’s wrist to make sure they don’t touch something?” she asks. “Because if so, we were really unsuccessful here.”

The your-hands-on-Rivian wares hook is naturally backed up with merch, through partners like MiiR water bottles and Mystery Ranch backpacks, but it also extends to taking the fear factor out of EV ownership. There’s an entire corner devoted to explaining how charging works, “Because we want you to understand what this vehicle will enable you to do,” Caravano notes, adding that a first-time EV owner might fear their Rivian can’t go that far. “So we wanted to make sure that that was front and center—this idea of how this can enable a new adventure.” 

The charging explainer is more softly reinforced with a seemingly haphazard (but decidedly designed that way) plywood backdrop to a living room space, complete with cushy sofas. This wall is littered with Post-it notes with destinations in mind, sub-sorted by day-trip, weekend and road-trip. This space gets flooded with light from the street and is bracketed by houseplants. You’d happily sip a latte here for hours and gaze at passersby. 

Caravano adds that this particular corner, with the High Line above and Little Island a block away, all matters greatly to the carmaker. There’s the tourist draw of non-New Yorkers and, presumably, people who love nature, too, checking a key box for Rivian. “The gift of this particular location is that it’s a hotspot of walking traffic, but also along the West Side Highway, of driving traffic,” Caravano explains. And the space will be added to with a far larger location in Williamsburg next year. “Zooming out for us,” Caravano paints a mental diagram of larger and larger circles. “We want to make sure that we know where our owners are—where are our order holders—and then we are identifying hotspots for EV adoption,” he says.

A safe bet, too, is that Rivian continues with the sort of ethos of their High Line space, sans salespeople trying to hook customers. “We want your whole family with you. That is part of the traditional car-buying experience,” Cherry stresses, “because car purchasing is mostly a collective decision. You’re bringing a friend, your kid; will my dog fit in here?” But as is clear at any Apple store, another model that has revamped the buying experience, Rivian’s approach will be soft, friendly and as joyful as the carmaker already showcases with its vehicles. 

Images courtesy of Rivian

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