Atema Architecture

Gramercy Park Apartment

Taking cues from boat and furniture design, we transformed this 1,200 sq.ft. penthouse overlooking Gramercy Park into a quietly luxurious and rigorously efficient two-bedroom, two-bath pied-a-terre for our clients that takes advantage of every bit of available space and daylight to create the feel and function of a much larger apartment.

The project is organized around a forty-foot long ribbed oak wall that leads one from the entry hall to the loft-like living/dining room and kitchen with its wide-open views over the park and skyline.  The wall provides a warm textural backdrop to the space and hides doors to a pantry and media rack, storage cabinet, and the master suite.  Functioning as bespoke furniture, the ribbing and door handles are designed to allow the doors to interlock with the wall with glove-like precision when fully opened.  Windows are framed in statuary marble that reflects light and provides additional subtle texture and warmth.  Hidden cabinets throughout provide a range of storage, including for TVs on motorized lifts and skis.  A narrow reveal at the top of the walls hides the heating and air conditioning and incorporates an invisible picture rail.

TED Office

TED, best known for the influential TED Talks website, is an organization that curates and facilitates the sharing of innovative ideas around the globe using new media and technology. They challenged us to envision what an office for the information age could be, and their motto: “ideas worth spreading,” became the DNA of our design.

We wanted to create a work environment that better supports physical well-being, which in turn supports the mental well-being that is key to good idea-creation and sharing.

The typology of the Theater emerged as a highly appropriate “heart” of the office. Their conferences are a form of theater, and as spaces designed for flexibility and idea exchange, theaters reflect TED’s mission beautifully, so we put a black-box theater-in-the-round in the middle of their office. The Theater serves simultaneously as “town square,” reception lounge, and informal work space, and is easily transformed into a presentation space where they host regular talks.

The physical office is less a fixed sequence of programmed spaces with a definable image than a transformable, process-driven, “soft” environment. Central spaces are defined by curtains or glass walls. Furniture is arranged to define team areas, but otherwise work areas are wide open to support TED’s collaborative culture. We developed a custom desk and other furniture in collaboration with Steelcase to clearly define each person’s space and provide options for privacy within a small footprint.

Acumen Office 1.0

Our client is a global non-profit venture capital firm who came to us looking for a work environment that supported their horizontal, collaborative organizational structure, but had a more focused, relevant identity, all the while keeping costs modest, focusing on sustainable design principles, and allowing them to take much of their brand-specific elements with them in the future.

Since we were developing a brand ID specific to Acumen, this became the inspiration for what we would term the Nomadic Project, whose Nomadic Elements would provide high visual richness and specific branding impact for relatively low cost, designed so they could be easily removed and reused in new future locations.  These elements ended up including: the “Saffron Wave” backlit ceiling canopy, whose main components were cut off-site by a CNC mill, then painted, assembled, and installed by a combination of client and architect labor; the fabric ceiling-hung panels; and the custom reception and dining area furniture made of blackened steel and reclaimed antique hear pine.