Architecture Research Office Creates a Soothing Manhattan Headquarters for Mattress Maker Casper

Casper, the mattress maker that calls itself the Sleep Company, wouldn’t want to do anything jarring. “It was important to present a relaxing environment,” says Kim Yao, a principal of Architecture Research Office, which designed the company’s lower Manhattan headquarters. “Our use of curves and arches helps set the tone.” There is no showroom in the space, but as Yao’s co-principal Adam Yarinsky points out, “We’re presenting the brand through its workplace.”

Luckily ARO had already designed a product for FilzFelt called Plank, a pillowlike acoustical panel covered in felt. An oversize version of it now surrounds Casper’s reception desk. Beyond reception, ARO had to provide space for 300 or so workers—who are there on a hybrid basis—while maintaining the quality of softness associated with the brand.
There are few private offices, in part because the views from the headquarters, which occupies 37,500 square feet on the 39th and 40th floors of 3 World Trade Center by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, are as spectacular as the sunlight pouring in. With the floor-to-ceiling glass entirely exposed, everyone at Casper gets to enjoy those amenities. Away from the windows, personal workstations alternate with pods, or collaboration booths, that are about 5 feet high. “When you’re in one, you feel very sheltered,” Yao notes.

Conference rooms and telephone booths hug the building’s core. Upper and lower common areas include a café big enough for all-company meetings. The new stairway connecting them, sheathed in solid white oak planks, contains a circular felt-lined cutout for somebody to lounge in.

Casper wants its workers to be aware of how it presents products to consumers, so retail vignettes pepper the space, including one near reception. Other furniture, which ARO chose in conjunction with Casper’s in-house design team, is a mix of pieces from Muuto and Herman Miller.

“Our goal was a very direct connection to the architecture,” Yarinsky says, explaining the decision to expose the concrete floor slabs throughout and leave mechanical equipment visible overhead. Also hanging from the ceiling are boat-shape acoustical panels, covered in felt and targeted by LED uplights. The panels bring noise down to a soothing level, which is exactly what a sleep company deserves.

geiger: armchairs (lounge)

carvart: workstations (of­fice area)

vode: custom linear fixtures

softline: armchairs

Interface: carpet tile

c.r. laurence: doors (entry)

rockwood: door pulls

muuto: dining chairs, dining tables, sofas, ot­to­mans, rugs

kvadrat: sofa fabric, ottoman fabric

filzfelt: felt, acoustical panels

herman miller: high tables, task chairs, desks

Shinnoki: paneling

amerlux; flos: recessed ceiling fixtures

hdlc: lighting consultant

longman lindsey: acoustical consultant

tmt: audiovisual consul­tant

benhar office interiors: furniture sup­plier

wsp: structural engineer

ama: mep

metropolitan architec­tural woodwork: wood­work

clune construction: general contractor

Bates Masi + Architects and David Kleinberg Design Associates Create a Contemporary East Hampton Estate

2022 Best of Year Winner for Beach House

Well before the East End of Long Island, New York, became known for shingle-style mega mansions, its residential vernacular was the saltbox, a simple two-story volume with a gable roof that comes closer to the ground in the back than in the front. Bates Masi + Architects decided it was the right form to give a new 11,450-square-foot weekend house for a couple and their family on a large plot of land in East Hampton. The clients asked for three semi-attached buildings, one for themselves and one each for their grown children (and their future progeny). Firm principal and Interior Design Hall of Fame member Paul Masi gravitated to the saltbox shape, so that the structures would feel protected from the elements in the back but wide open in the front, where the higher rooflines accommodate two stories of windows, all offering spectacular Atlantic Ocean views.

Masi’s other big move was to arrange the three pavilions in an L-shape, which provides a sense of enclosure around the yard and swimming pool. The saltboxes are joined by glass connectors, but only at ground level; each has its own staircase to second-floor bedrooms and baths. The architect relied almost entirely on five materials: cedar, which clads most of the exterior; oak, for much of the interior; limestone, for floors, countertops, terraces, and some external walls; darkened bronze, for various kinds of trim; and, of course, glass. “We had to limit the palette because the house is so big,” Masi explains. “You lose the essence of it if there’s too much going on.” This ethos harks back to the early 1980s, when firm founder and fellow Hall of Famer Harry Bates—now 94 and retired—built modest beach houses out of whatever he could find in local lumber yards, a necessary discipline that became part of the firm’s DNA. When Masi joined Bates in 1998, he began devising ways to keep things simple even as clients demanded more and more luxury.

This couple, intending that the property becomes a family heirloom passed down from generation to generation, wanted to make sure it would last. That was fine with Masi, who thought in centuries rather than decades while designing it. “We put a lot of redundancy into the building envelope,” he explains, noting that the house is sheathed in two layers of shingle-like boards with gutters and leaders sandwiched between them to keep water away from the weathertight shell. The cedar is fastened to the structure with custom stainless-steel clips that don’t penetrate the wood, avoiding the damage nails or screws could cause the boards when they expand and contract.

The architect didn’t make things easy for himself. Exterior walls and roofs, identically clad, meet without even a whiff of an overhang. Exposing the transition from one surface to another means there’s nowhere to hide even the smallest flaw. “It’s harder than it looks to pull that off,” Masi admits. “Everything has to be perfect.” That includes four “light chimneys,” his term for a series of massive bronze-clad skylights that project through the roof. They ensure light “cascades down through the stairwells,” he continues, an effect that’s enhanced by open-tread staircases hanging on thin vertical steel-and-oak struts that descend from the second-floor ceiling. The stairwells double as ideally illuminated display areas for larger pieces of art (the couple are passionate collectors). And where the house turns a 90-degree angle, the nearly cubic 18-by-18-foot glass-enclosed connector space serves as a sculpture gallery. Delicate cedar-slat screens provide necessary shade, while large, operable windows make it easy getting lage artworks in and out of the space.

The clients brought in Interior Design Hall of Fame member David Kleinberg to furnish the house. The founding partner of David Kleinberg Design Associates, who has worked on multiple residences for the same couple before, softened the vast main living area with a custom beige wool rug. Much of the furniture is upholstered in shades of gray, including custom club chairs and sofas and a pair of French 1950’s oak lounge chairs. The seating is gathered around two Fredrikson Stallard cast-acrylic coffee tables that sit on the rug like massive chunks of ice. A patinated-bronze and polished-copper suspended light sculpture by Niamh Barry adds a note of drama overhead.

But Kleinberg has no desire to hog credit for this house. “It’s clear that architecture was the highest priority,” he notes. “The artworks were second in importance. And then came the furnishings, which were to be laid back, relaxed, and supportive of the architecture and art.” What Kleinberg doesn’t mention is that many of the pieces he has so carefully curated could well become heirlooms in their own right.

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katherine dalene weil, nick darin, nick braaksma, hung fai tang: bates masi + architects

lance duckett scott: david kleinberg design associates

orsman design: lighting consultant

steven maresca: structural engineer

men at work construction: general contractor

awg art advisory: art consultant

perry guillot: landscape consultant

maison gerard: oak lounge chairs, light sculpture (living area)

david gill gallery: coffee tables

Patterson Flynn: custom rug

joseph walsh studio: custom table (dining area)

victoria + albert: tub (bathroom)

apparatus: pendant fixtures (kitchen)

wolf: range (kitchen)

vent-a-hood: ventilation hood

sub-zero: refrigerator

bernd goeckler: glass table (sculpture gallery)

bybee stone company: limestone flooring and cladding

Keller Minimal Windows: windows and doors

SelgasCano Pair Preservation With Innovation for Their Weekend Home in Spain

The married architects José Selgas and Lucía Cano have become known for their luminous buildings, mostly made from translucent materials in bright colors and bulbous shapes. These include Second Home coworking spaces in Los Angeles, London, and Lisbon, Portugal; a school in Nairobi; and rec centers and meeting halls throughout their native Spain. But the couple’s weekend house—decidedly rustic, with barely a smooth surface in sight—couldn’t be more different from those widely published projects. Does that portend a change in architectural direction for SelgasCano?

“We always try to work with what we find,” responds Selgas, reeling off a list of projects in which the couple used existing elements. In the case of the weekend house, in Cáceres province, a few hours west of Madrid, those elements included three farm buildings—a pair of chicken coops and a small stable for goats and donkeys—closely clustered around a rudimentary two-story cottage. The cottage didn’t have a source of heat—not a fireplace or even a chimney. When the previous owners would build a fire to keep warm, they did it on a stone in the middle of the kitchen floor, eventually blackening the woodwork overhead.

Over the four-year renovation, Selgas and Cano did install a fireplace and stoves, but other­wise they changed as little as they could. One of their main interventions involved lowering floors, by excavating, and raising ceilings to get a bit more headroom. “We can’t enter like chickens,” the 6-foot 4-inch Selgas says. But when the local contractors thought the ceilings should be 8 feet or higher, he demurred. A bit under 7 feet was enough, lest the character of the buildings be destroyed. “The existing scale was really nice.”

Still, where roofs were raised above the tops of existing walls, in the cottage and stable, there were gaps the couple filled with sheets of acrylic, giving the structures newfound lightness. They also chiseled holes into some of the masonry walls, “to bring in additional sunshine,” Cano says. Acrylic was cut into panes that fit those irregularly shaped openings. Inside, while much of the woodwork and masonry were left in their natural state, some sections were painted white in order to bounce light around.

They added rooms within the existing footprint, mostly using salvaged materials, including some of the blackened wood from the cottage’s original first-floor ceiling. “It’s part of the history of the house,” Cano notes. Much of the design work was extemporaneous. The contractors, skilled as they were, weren’t comfortable working from plans. “So we typically would go there with them and say, ‘Let’s put a wall up to this height,’ and ‘Let’s install a wardrobe there,’ and then we’d choose the wood,” Selgas explains. He and Cano supervised construction together. And they did so forgivingly. The house, Cano says, “wasn’t meant to have perfect anything.”

The couple’s own bedroom, largely below-grade, had been one of the chicken coops. Its new roof is a concrete slab covered with soil and native plants. Puncturing a thick sidewall are two unusual windows. The first was made from a stump that one of the builders was saving for just the right project. The other was a kind of barrel, built to be installed a few degrees off horizontal. Selgas and Cano planned to use it to see mountain peaks, but the builders installed it upside down. “So now you see the lawn,” Selgas reports. “It’s almost like a piece of sculpture.” The other chicken coop and the former stable became the compound’s two guest bedrooms.

In the cottage, the original kitchen was pretty much open to the elements. “We kept much of that feeling,” Selgas continues. But he and Cano created a structure out of rebar to support the living and dining areas in the renovated upstairs. They also used rebar to frame the new stairway. And they broke a hole through the wall, “So the kitchen would have a relationship with the outside table, where we typically have dinner,” Cano says. Asked how they made the hole, she adds, “carefully and by hand.”

To complement the couple’s modern and vintage pieces by the likes of Monica Förster, Dirk Van Sliedrecht, and Hans Wegner, the builders made custom furniture on-site. “They have the time, the patience, to do things you can’t do in places where labor is expensive,” Selgas says. He said the price of the renovation was about $50 a square foot, or about $65,000 altogether—a fraction of what it would have cost in any major city.

After finishing converting the original buildings, Selgas and Cano decided they needed space to keep garden tools and patio furniture. An existing stone wall became one side of their planned storage building. They added the other walls, one of which is punctuated by yellow doors, and a wooden ceiling (made of the formwork from the project’s concrete pour)—perfectly adequate for a storeroom. Except that while working on it, Selgas says, “We noticed the incredible views and decided to transform it into a guest house,” albeit one that’s far simpler, spatially and structurally, than the main house. (A portion of this new structure was reserved for storage.)

Asked what she likes best about her family’s weekend compound, Cano answers, “It’s the setting. It’s nature.” That includes a rushing stream they use for swimming and an Eden of fig, olive, orange, and lemon trees. In fact, as the plantings around, and on, the house grow in, “The buildings are disappearing,” she says happily.

For his part, Selgas, an environmentalist, is particularly pleased by the project’s modesty. “Wasting space is a problem for our society,” he says. “We should only create what we’re going to use.” Like his and Cano’s gently upgraded buildings, he adds, “The future will be more about renovations than new things.”

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luismi quintana: builder

rubén criba: carpenter

cisal: sink fittings (kitchen).