Gotta Catch ‘Em All

UPON FIRST GLANCE inside The Trainer Court (formerly Poké Court), one might mistake it for a locale of a sleek designer brand, but a closer look reveals its heart: the Japanese card game turned multimedia phenomenon, Pokémon. The Trainer Court began as a side hustle for Founder Courtney Chin in 2023 and, almost three years later, the brand opened its first permanent physical store in New York’s Meatpacking District, offering fans a place to buy, sell and trade cards, and discover the latest merchandise.

Fun yet sophisticated, the 2000-square-foot space, designed by GAMPworks (New York), “needed to look like a beautiful New York store that just happens to be about Pokémon,” says Priscilla Auyeung, GAMPworks.

The retail floor is open and airy, filled with clever homages for fans to discover: Pokémon’s signature character, Pikachu, makes cameo appearances in the signage, while the iconic red and white Poké Ball is subtly honored through the light fixtures and in the 1500 handmade subway tiles that line the entire store. The subway tiles, alongside industrial aesthetics such as exposed ductwork and high ceilings, serve as nods to “a pure New York experience,” says Maxine Gao, GAMPworks.

A signature “pack bar” is at the center of the space with a counter crafted from recycled material to create a terrazzo pattern. Behind the pack bar is custom maple millwork, ready to hold more than 10,000 packs of Pokémon cards with easy access and organization for team members. Taking inspiration from historic Chinese medicine cabinets, the millwork design took months to finalize in order to “calibrate every single centimeter so that you had enough space to fit all those cards,” says Auyeung.

The design and contracting teams worked with the building’s inherently narrow architecture, a reality that was considered in every step of the process. “When you’re doing retail in the city, especially on a smaller scale, retail logistics is always a challenge, but you approach the project from the logistics and scheduling,” says Daniel Monteiro, Managing Partner, Reidy Contracting Group. “So there was enough time for us to get the ceilings, flooring and walls done by the time the millwork came in.”

It also includes a VIP and staff lounge, elegantly decorated with influences from traditional and modern Japanese aesthetics. Design motifs from the front of the store were integrated into the lounge, but with a few twists, such as using dark walnut wood instead of the retail floor’s brighter maple wood grains.

When guests enter and exit the store, they pass a mural on the wall, hand-painted by Chin, Auyeung and Gao, a testament to the passion behind The Trainer Court. “We don’t want it to be a store just for Pokémon collectors,” says Gao. “We want it to be a store for everyone.”

The Trainer Court exudes a luxurious aesthetic as the backdrop to Pokémon collecting and trading.

PHOTO GALLERY (9 IMAGES)
PHOTOS: ERIK BERNSTEIN PHOTOGRAPHY