After a long hiatus from the Dream Closet project we have a whole lot of ideas ready to go and are anxious to get rolling. We also have a new contributor who’s ready to jump on board to help us with some ideas so keep an eye out for our future posts. To get the show rolling, we decided to talk about one of our greatest frustration with most of the closets we see; lights! Or the lack there of.
As is often the case in many commercial lease in New York City, the landlord has agree to help built out the tenant space in according our needs. This can take place in a variety of scenarios; the landlord can provide a dollar per square foot contribution to the construction budget, or in other instances build out the space using their own contractor and architect in accordance to design provided by the tenant.
For this week’s EZarchitecture: Work podcast we will discuss the design for the headquarters building for Diane Von Furstenberg Studio, in the fashionable meat packing district on the West side of NYC. The DVF Studio is a project from one of our favorite architectural design firm; Work AC. Like many of the other project from Work, aside from the many wonderful detailing and choice of finishes, DVF Studio also contains an interesting special feature. Want to find out what it is? Check out our podcast below and read on!
Finding the perfect layout often time requires a constant re-evaluation of the various requirements. We made significant progress during our previous layout session and we now have decent idea of what works well and what every one’s preferences are. This week we will concentrate on the question of cost, instead of creating options reflecting the various approaches towards finding an optimal layout base on functional requirements. We created two options, the first reflecting our base layout, and the second showing the various options that we felt might have an cost impact on the project.
We spent the past two weeks experimenting and refining our layout, although there are one and two areas where that process continues. This week we will focus on finding a theme that will define the character of our space design.
So you have been talking and dreaming of this for years, after searching high and low through the New York real estate jungle and dealing with the tangle of loan requirements, regulations and bid wars, you manage to buy your dream home. You even manage to pull off a cute renovation project, perhaps a bit more costly and more troublesome then you would like, but you loved the results. You settle in happily and few years down the road.. well, there just a few things that needs some fine tuning. Only a few, really!
As long as you got a nickel, we promise to make it worthwhile! We ran our Ask an Architect booth at the Brooklyn Flea this past weekend and had another fun day. The weather turn out surprisingly warm and we again manage to resist the temptation of all the cool tchotchke from the various booths in the market (admittedly with some difficulties).
We spend most of last week completing our space function outline as well as creating and reviewing the first iteration of our layout options. Now that we have a decent idea of the various functional requirements we are ready to dig a little deeper and provide a bit more definition on the various options.
Space constrain is always an issue for just about any urban based environment, regardless of the type or nature of the project we are designing for. So we are always on the lookout for unconventional and flexible ways to maximize the function of any space. We looked at several examples of projects designed with moving partitions and shelving. Such as Gary Chang’s transformer apartment: link. But surprisingly we find a lot less examples of similar thinking for the design of the work environment.
EZarchitecture: Work, is the other face of our practice, similar to our approach with our home oriented post. We will use this opportunity to talk about some of our general thoughts regarding the design of corporate interior projects. But look for special features where we focus on specific aspects of commercial interior design such as lobbies in the future.
