Niki Cheng and Shaokao Cheng at their Chelsea BoConcept store. (PMc)

The first time The Observer met Niki and Shaokao Cheng, it was July, during the opening night of Julio Gaggia’s art show. Mr. Gaggia, the boyfriend of the plastic surgeon Mark Warfel, was preparing his work “Living Art: Chelsea Boy Apartment,” during which he would live for five days as a window display model at the BoConcept furniture store on West 18th Street. He spent the week eating, sleeping, working—and performing other, less-mentionable activities—in a showroom that divided him from gawkers outside with a pane of glass.

While we lounged about on the display furniture, socialite photographer Patrick McMullan brought over a petite woman with short, pixie-cropped hair.

“Niki is one of the few Power Asians in New York society,” he loudly whispered, flourishing Ms. Cheng before us. She smiled shyly and posed for a photograph before excusing herself.

It would be two weeks before we realized that Ms. Cheng and her husband owned the store where we had dropped more than one canapé between the cushions of a $3,000 couch.

In fact, the couple owns all five locations of the Danish furniture store in New York City, and another two in New Jersey. But the stores themselves aren’t the reason Mr. McMullan calls the Chengs “Power Asians.” Rather, it’s the couple’s seemingly innate social instincts, their ability to leverage a fairly cookie-cutter, mid-market design base into a celebrity-filled social whirl. One might say “Only in America,” or (even worse) “Only in New York,” but this wouldn’t exactly cover it. There is a certain type that thrives in Manhattan no matter what they’re selling, no matter where they’re from, no matter how few resources they have upon arriving.

If Darwin were alive today and researching the survival of New York species, he would do well to study the Chengs. They’re not social climbers, per se, but social movers—Gladwellian “connectors” who know everyone from celebrities to the guys with the best drapes in the city. They share their knowledge strategically with other key additions to their ever-expanding Rolodex. For Niki Cheng, 39, and Shaokao Cheng, 41, life is not about climbing a ladder. It’s about traversing the monkey bars that crisscross Manhattan.

“Niki and Shaokao have a wonderfully progressive view of New York society,” said Village Voice scribe Michael Musto. “They mix into their social circle drag performers, club holdouts, top celebrities and the corporate crowd. It’s all-inclusive.”

Last Friday, we met Ms. Cheng for a second time—again at the Chelsea store. While we were there, actress Faye Dunaway came in and had what one could only call a fit of method acting for a sequel to Mommie Dearest. The recently evicted Academy Award winner had come in two weeks ago and bought a piece of art from the store, and now she wanted Ms. Cheng’s help on a new design project.

“I adore this store. I’ve raved about it; they really need to get some of this stuff to London,” Ms. Dunaway told The Observer. “They don’t have anything like it there now.”

Unable to find a confidentiality agreement for us to sign, she stormed out shortly thereafter. (We didn’t get to tell her that there are actually 13 BoConcept stores in the U.K.) It was the kind of scene that no one wants a reporter to witness while writing a profile, but if there was any bad blood, Ms. Cheng didn’t show it.

“Really, don’t be upset,” she told The Observer, rubbing our arm soothingly. “She’ll call back. Anyway, where were we?”

The Chengs are adept at pleasing their celebrity clients, a skill that has come in handy while designing P. Diddy’s home, Jay-Z’s office (bed included), Mary J. Blige’s entire apartment and Estelle’s closet. Susan Sarandon, Lil’ Kim and Patti LaBelle have also used the duo’s interior design services, and Ms. LaBelle sang at the BoConcept flagship store for a Lance Armstrong benefit. They count designers Vivienne Tam, Asher Levine and Zang Toi among their closest friends.

Not that everyone in their circle is a brand name. After Ms. Dunaway left, we rushed over to Astor Place, where BoConcept was sponsoring a tent for a Christmas tree stand run by a Brit named Marco Romero, his girlfriend and his brother. Though he runs a jewelry shop in Greece most of the year, Mr. Romero spends three weeks in December living out of a van selling holiday firs, and Ms. Cheng took it upon herself to decorate the tent that the trio takes shifts in.

Despite a franchise that traffics mainly in large-scale items, Ms. Cheng has a burgeoning obsession with “micro-units”—apartments that are between 250 and 300 square feet.

She wanted to prove that it was possible to use BoConcept furniture to decorate a very small space, and the Romeros provided her with an interesting challenge. Their tent was about seven feet long and seven wide, and the guys had to hunch over even when standing at its tallest point. Empty, the space seemed minuscule. But after Ms. Cheng put down an orange rug, a short shelving unit, an ottoman, a table and two chairs (as well as several well-placed decorative objects), the tent looked like a living room on the Lower East Side.

It’s never quite clear why Ms. Cheng decided to treat Romero and his tent like VIPs, but when it was revealed that a $3,000 lamp from the store broke on the ride over, Ms. Cheng gasped, then turned to Mr. Romero. “We’ll have to get you another one.”

Shaokao Cheng, Cienna Cheng and Niki Cheng. (Patrick McMullan)

Perhaps the random act of kindness was a viral marketing ploy, or stemmed from her own back story of struggle. (Probably a bit of both, if we’re being honest.) Niki Cheng—née Chong—was 25 when she moved to New York in the mid-’90s. She had an architecture degree from the University of Malaysia and a visa that was only good for one year. She was scraping by as a coat-check girl at Von when she met Mr. Cheng, a young banker whose father had given him a $90,000 loan to buy a single-bedroom apartment on Madison and 32nd.

The two were introduced by a restaurant co-worker of hers, and she began relocating her belongings to his apartment after the first date, she said. After a heady three months of dating, Mr. Cheng invited her to move into his place permanently. “He didn’t realize I already had,” she laughed.

But there was a catch: his apartment in Murray Hill would be undergoing extensive renovations for two years. They made a pact: if they could live through the 24 months without breaking up, they would become a pair in the business sense as well. Mr. Cheng also pushed his girlfriend to get a job at a furniture retail outlet that would give her a three-year visa.

One day while working there, Ms. Cheng came upon a catalog that featured a coffee table identical to the type she sold. Except that Ms. Cheng’s outlet was selling her model for $2,000, and this unheard of Danish brand was selling its at $299.

The brand was called BoConcept, and its international franchise operation was just getting off the ground. The Chengs approached the company with the idea of opening a New York store on Madison Avenue, but were turned down. BoConcept’s owners thought that space in the city was too expensive and there wouldn’t be enough room to show the big items. In their view, New Yorkers were not the target market for their oversized aesthetic.

But the duo were undeterred. “We had spent a year putting together research that proved that this store could be opened in New York,” Ms. Cheng said. They also showed their plans to a friend they met at Bungalow 8.

Their friend turned out to be designer Max Azria, who spent 10 minutes calculating the figures the couple had acquired during their research, sketched a number down on his pad, and told them to go for it.

In 2003, BoConcept agreed to let the couple try their hand at a New York flagship for $300,000. “We had everything to lose,” Ms. Cheng said. “They had nothing to lose.” Niki was 28 and Shaokao 30. They had recently gotten married in Hawaii after three years of dating because, as Mr. Cheng put it, “My wife went to three different psychics who told her that marriage would bring us good fortune.” Mr. Cheng and his father remortgaged their houses to pay for the initial investment.

They barely survived the first two years; they couldn’t figure out the computer systems, and there were issues with shipping. Their business model might not have actually worked had Mr. and Ms. Cheng not been so socially ambitious.

With his degree in engineering and hers in architecture, they were able to use their conjoined home-decorating skills for seemingly un-BoConcept-related purposes. When one big-name celebrity client called, nothing from BoConcept would fit in their closet, so Ms. Cheng happily suggested shelves and fixtures that did. Soon, the singer was calling the couple to redesign her living room, and this time they used items from their Dutch catalog.

The fact that BoConcept’s furniture design is somewhere between IKEA and West Elm is somewhat beside the point. What the Chengs have done was take a relatively bland furniture store from a not especially popular Danish franchise and parlay it into a personal calling card.

When the two aren’t peddling 12-piece sectionals, they can often be found at yoga or otherwise getting fit. At 12:54 a.m. Saturday morning, The Observer received a text from Niki, who asked if we wanted to attend a 10 a.m. Bikram session with her. (We pleaded out.)

Later that morning, Ms. Cheng was at the Madison store, dressed from head to toe in brown Juicy velour. She helped hunk real estate agent Ryan Serhant from Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing find items for his move from Pine Street to Chelsea ... which of course will be documented on Bravo’s website. After he left, Ms. Cheng rushed out herself for a private second yoga session of the day, but not before inviting The Observer over for a home-cooked meal the next night with “some friends” that included Ms. Tam and Mr. Musto.
http://youtu.be/JjI2SwrGnHs
A 2010 BoConcept commerical featuring Mr. Musto and Ms. Cheng.

In 2006, the Chengs moved with their baby daughter Cienna from Murray Hill to a $1.7 million, 2,200-square-foot artist’s loft with 12-foot-high ceilings on Fifth Avenue at 29th Street. This is the space, apparently, where you can keep two six-foot ottomans without it feeling cluttered.

Cienna is now 6, their son Eden 3; when we arrived Sunday evening, their mom was running around the gigantic apartment, scooping them up for bed. Ms. Cheng looked ready to fall asleep herself, after making a feast: home-cooked dishes with pork belly, chicken, eggplant and fish, and a lotus soup for dessert. Ms. Tam was there, and Mr. Musto showed up for dessert. Mr. Levine wasn’t able to make it, but the table was more than full.

Mr. Cheng explained that she had rescheduled her meeting with Ms. Dunaway, but was too busy cooking to make it down to the store. So she had the actress come up to her apartment and multitasked.
As we were leaving, Mr. Cheng asked sincerely if we would come back and have dinner when we weren’t on the job. Ms. Cheng had already invited us to their Christmas party and a luxury garage sale they were co-sponsoring this week. They were so nice! How could we decline when they were so generous?

Another rung added to the monkey bars.

Further, the Observer tried to reach out to Kim, but 5WPR--the Ronn Torossian-led firm that had shepherded Kim through a number of P.R. crises including her trial and imprisonment--no longer represents her, and has not for, an assistant told us, "six or seven months." Oh, but Lil' Kim is still listed as a client on the 5W site! The assistant chuckled. "I know." [Update: 5WPR informed the Observer in an email that the site is meant to imply client experience, not list current clients.] She didn't know, though, who worked with Kim now.

IMDbPro's only other listed contact was Kim's entertainment booker--"I handle some of her bookings," he told us, at least--who refused to share the name of her publicist and asked for a request for comment, in writing, that he would then pass along. It's chaos in the house of Kim, which is perhaps why she's self-distributing Black Friday and administering its PayPal account (mixtapes are often available for free online as the alternative to more polished studio albums).

At least her fans are willing to pay, right? At the "Black Friday Cover & Purchase" thread of fan forum Lil' Kim Zone (registration required), a fan wrote "eww!! gets boyfriends credit card." Another wrote "This better not a damn scam... Pulls out amex card..." The mix of repulsion and duty was common (though another common note, simple annoyance with the wayward star, was struck by the commenter who wrote "I'm not putting money in Kim's pocket to support foolery"). The most prescient comment came from a reader who said that "this whole thing is still poorly promoted[...] she's removed herself from the industry and she is still going on with this beef. So either she has a brilliant plan or se is making her last stand." For a star whose last remaining strength may be her fanbase, alienating fans by escalating a spat into a blood feud may be unwise. But who would tell Kim differently?

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

April 17, 1989: Virgil Charles Sylvia, 21, is stabbed to death outside of "illegal, floating club" Payday near Gramercy Gramercy Park.

March 25, 1990: 87 people are killed at Happy Land, another illegal club in the Bronx, when Julio Gonzalez sets the place on fire after arguing with his ex-girlfriend, who was a coat check girl there.

Nov. 23, 1990: David Lemus and Olmedo Hidalgo shoot bouncer Marcus Peterson outside of Palladium, the dance club on 14^th Street that is now a New York University dorm.

June 28, 1991: Steven Venizelos, owner of trendy East Village after-hours spot The World, is found shot to death on the club's balcony.

January 19, 1995: Sean McKenzie and Orlando Parker are killed at East Flatbush club Legend when a man opened fire in the middle of the dance floor.

June 21, 1996: Brothers Victor and Simon Dedaj beat, stab, and shoot to death a waiter and a bouncer at the Upper East Side outpost of Scores.

April 9, 2001: After being ejected, 16-year-old Terrence Davis is stabbed to death outside of Tunnel at West 27^th St. and 12^th Ave.

April 13, 2003: Bouncer Dana Blake is stabbed to death outside of Guernica on Avenue B by Isaias Umali after a dispute concerning smoking in the club, which had just been banned.

May 23, 2006: Bouncer Stephen Sakai shoots Gustavo Cuadros to death outside of Opus 22 in Chelsea.

February 25, 2006: Graduate student Imette St. Guillen is choked to death by Darryl Littlejohn after leaving The Falls in Soho, where he was a bouncer.

July 25, 2006: 18-year-old Jennifer Moore is killed after leaving Chelsea's Guest House.

Feb. 3, 2007: Orlando Valle dies after being pushed down an elevator shaft by actor Granville Adams at BED in Chelsea.

Nov. 23, 2007: Shamel McKinney, a friend of the rapper Fabolous, is stabbed to death at Duvet in the Flatiron district.

Graydon Carter bought the lease on the Monkey Bar on East 54th Street. One of his partners told the Post, "It's just going to be a little bar in Midtown." Just like the Waverly Inn is a little bar in the West Village! [P6]

Scarlett Johansson is still talking about being friends with Barack Obama on the Internet. [Newsday]

Morgan Freeman and his wife are divorcing, just days after he wrecked a car with their mutual "friend" in the passenger seat. [NYDN]

A woman was found dead on a rooftop after attending Lil' Kim's birthday party at Spotlight Live in Times Square. [TMZ]

Donald Trump bought a golf course in Colts Neck, N.J. [P6]

Simon Doonan has a new bit of fashion advice! Click the player below to watch.

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According to Simon & Schuster's corporate spokesman Adam Rothberg, the lawsuits were not filed simultaneously for any particular reason.

"They're just two cancel-and-collects that happened at the same time," he said, adding that in both cases, Simon & Schuster had just "exhausted all other avenues on recouping the money on a manuscript that wasn't delivered."

"We're suing people who didn't deliver on manuscripts that we contracted with them for," he said. "That's the bottom line. End of story. Any issue of timing is simply coincidence."

David Vigliano, who sold Lil' Kim's book, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Mark Gerald, who sold Foxy Brown's, declined to comment.

The Transom caught up with Marc Jacobs and his lover at the Rufus Wainwright shows. Yes, they're madly in love, despite recent reports of a breakup—and they can't wait for Lil' Kim to get out of prison on July 4.

A Wall Street tower has been besieged by a toilet terrorist—but the forces of cleanliness may have won out. For now!

Owen Wilson works New York—and apparently leaves no hot woman un-picked-up on his Thursday night tour of Bungalow 8 and Marquee.

Also: Everyone likes a man with some extra meat. The Break-Up was a really good movie! Who pays for Mark Green's endless candidacies? How does a hedge fund poet survive? Jackie O's old apartment goes for $32 million. And, remembering Barbara Epstein.

So while every newsroom in the country crowded around their CNN this afternoon to keep up with Ms. Miller being remanded to jail until October, The Transom shook its ass over to the 40 Centre Street federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan. Lawyers, rappers, and drag queens all crowded into the fourth floor lobby and waited for word of Lil' Kim's perjury sentence. Ms. Kim, also known as Kimberly Jones, or, by her own account, "that bitch with a thousand looks," received a year and a day in prison for lying to a grand jury. She will begin serving in mid-September.

Hardcore fans (the ones with tattoos and scrapbooks) had shown up at 7 a.m., and even some of them didn't make it into the actual courtroom. At least forty people kept vigil in the hall, including Lil Kim's friends, label reps, lawyers, and extended family. Meanwhile, big guns like Warner Music Group executive vice president Kevin Liles and rapper/former boxer Freddie Foxxx stayed in the back, drinking Snapples and talking to members of the Hustle Hard Entertainment entourage. "I'm just wishing for the best," Mr. Liles said. "That's it, man."

Mr. Foxxx, a massive, massive man who helped escort Lil Kim's tiny mother out of the courthouse after the hearing, told the Transom to take a walk. "I don't do randoms," he said after being approached for an interview. "The police do randoms." Fans stayed away from Freddie; they kept busy trading photos and comparing their Queen Bee tattoos. Hot. The only person the Transom can think of who has a Judith Miller tattoo is Norman Pearlstine. You know, as a reminder of what shame feels like.

Bottom line is: if the judges in this country have any sense of humor, they'll put Ms. Kim and Ms. Miller in the same cell. Two girls with tight lips, paying the price for refusing to snitch. It's a match made in heaven... and it might make a great entry for Ms. Miller's prison blog.
—Leon Neyfakh