A few weeks ago, Alisa Grifo and Marco Romeny returned to Manhattan. They’re usually based between Marseille and Stockholm, but as founders of the cult store Kiosk, the couple recently curated a pop-up store at Gordon Robichaux Gallery in Union Square, also showing a selection of Romeny’s neon artworks.

Like many others who jump the New York City ship, their homecoming meant a visit to an American diner, and to a storage unit. Only for Grifo and Romeny, opening their storage meant unlatching their 1,278-piece archive of objects from around the world, ranging from dish brushes to toys to no shortage in variety of notebooks.

Organizing and displaying a holiday collection with select archival pieces (some, such as a foam pink dog, not for sale) warranted the odd greasy grilled cheese—American cheese—for the sleepless couple. The New York City that Grifo and Romney remember most fondly is one without too much frill. The two have a keen eye for beauty in simplicity, purpose, and intentional design.

Kiosk collections are often themed by location, resulting in portraits of Grifo’s and Romney’s travels in the form of unique, independently produced objects. “We’re in real local stores, we see how people do things in their shops all over the planet when we travel,” Romeny says. They have always described their items with playful anecdotes from their adventures; a Greek sugar powder is described as a “precursor for a lollipop.” Since the closing of Kiosk’s permanent store in SoHo in 2014, their products have been exhibited online, and in a few short-term locations that have ranged from New York’s P.S.1 to London’s I.C.A. to Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in France.