Sinvin, a commercial real estate and advisory firm, asked Mapos to design their new headquarters in a historic warehouse building in Hudson Square on the lower West side of Manhattan.

As experts in real estate, Sinvin smartly purchased the entire 10,000 SF floor and planned to subdivide it into three tenant spaces, taking the largest space for themselves and renting the other two. Their brief to Mapos focused on their own 4,000 SF space and included creating an attractive public hallway and restrooms as amenities to attract future tenants.

Sinvin asked Mapos for a design that would accommodate the needs of their current and future staff, as well as act as a calling card and brand statement for their business. Their employees need to be happy and comfortable in their home, and clients need to feel inspired that Sinvin is a forward-thinking and progressive company to do business with.

We started by leveraging the existing character of the concrete-framed building. This technique celebrates the existing structure with a clean white painted ceiling, fully exposed flared-capital columns, and polished concrete floors. Not only does this reduce the budget on base building finishes, it ensures the focus will be on the million dollar views of SOHO to the east, which also happens to be Sinvin’s primary real estate territory. Fully exposing the columns and their capitals involved a strategic back-and-forth process to ensure the interior partitions and demising walls were not located on the column lines and, if needed, stopped at 8’ above the floor to let the capital sit free in space.

We organized the office to maximize daylight and views by leaving the center of the office open with natural lighting from the large, eastern windows. The entry and reception, two partners’ offices, and communal kitchen each sit in one of the four corners of the office. Sliding doors separate the kitchen from the large conference room, so when there are no meetings the conference room effectively doubles as a company lounge. Smaller offices for managers are on the interior wall, each with a floor-to-ceiling window looking into the bullpen and out at the views beyond.

Mapos conceived a custom wall panel system to organize the space and unify the design of the office. Modular frames of natural steel line the bullpen. The walls are infill panels of either a solid painted surface, dark walnut, or glass. A natural steel lintel 8 feet above the ground separates the wall panels from the Clerestory windows at the top of the frames. The windows allow natural light to reflect off the uninterrupted white ceiling, making the office feel bigger and brighter, while the lintel brings the volume of the room down to a more human scale. Upholstered walls, and floor and window coverings round out the material palette to complement the wood, glass, and steel.

In all the common areas, the finishes are a study in restraint, durability, and elegance.  Impactful lighting elevates the polished surfaces and white columns in the corridor and elevator lobby. The shared bathrooms were completely gutted and redesigned to become 4 private bathrooms. This strategy helped Sinvin attract two high-profile tenants in the North American showroom for Belstaff, the British outerwear company, and the management office for Julian Schnabel’s artistic endeavors.

The resulting design hits the client’s three biggest requests from the brief: attract high quality tenants and neighbors, provide a professional environment that their employees will enjoy, and create a brand statement that says Sinvin is committed to sophistication and high design.