Meyer Davis Designs a Sprawling Manhattan Penthouse

2023 Best of Year Honoree for Large Apartment

A chance encounter started the ball rolling on the redesign of a full-floor penthouse atop one of New York’s most avant-garde structures. The glittering 56 Leonard in TriBeCa, completed in 2017 by Herzog & de Meuron, is often affectionately likened to a stack of Jenga blocks. The cantilevered upper floors make the 57-story building a standout on the downtown skyline and give its lucky residents uninterrupted 360-degree views.

“One weeknight, I was out having drinks with friends when a potential client happened to pop in,” recalls Will Meyer, principal of Meyer Davis. The men were acquainted but had not seen each other in years. “It was midnight, but he said, ‘I just bought this new apartment. Let’s go look at it.’” Up they went several dozen stories, emerging into a 5,500-square-foot aerie surrounded by 14-foot-tall windows. “Imagine coming out of the elevator and seeing these outrageous views. It was a white box with nothing going on but also the most amazing blank slate possible.”

Soon after, Meyer and fellow principal Gray Davis—jointly inducted last year into the Interior Design Hall of Fame—met with the homeowner to share their thoughts on making the vast residence more human-scale and inviting. “The client appreciates good design,” Davis says, “and loves music and hosting parties. But the apartment also had to feel comfortable when he’s there alone or with his kids.”

Meyer Davis Creates a Warm and Approachable Penthouse Design

“The client had a clear idea of how it should feel: warm and approachable,” says Meyer Davis associate Shannon Senyk, senior design lead on the project and at the firm. “The views were there, but the space itself was quite cold and austere. We needed to add layers through architectural finishes and soft, lush textures.” Conjuring welcome is a practiced skill for the firm, which places not only 60th on our 100 Giants list but also 24th among the Hospitality Giants.

Meyer Davis Transforms a Loftlike Layout into Functional Zones

The team devised a number of strategies to tame the open, loftlike layout, which is augmented by two terraces and a balcony totaling 1,600 square feet of outdoor real estate. “A super-large space should be zoned in subtle ways, making rooms without making walls,” Meyer observes. The designers arranged the furniture informally, with three separate seating groups in the main living area “so you can hop around and sit in different places,” as Davis puts it. Chief among the architectural upgrades—and there were many, including four-and-a-half renovated baths and an oak-and-marble kitchen beneath an existing statement stove hood—was a zoning gesture Meyer reports “made all the difference in the world”: a raised oak platform that spans about a quarter of the living area.

Furnishings Reflect a Relaxed Luxury Aesthetic 

The furnishings—predominantly new or custom pieces with a couple of vintage items thrown into the mix—all contribute to Meyer Davis’s trademark relaxed luxury, providing deep comfort while hold­ing their own against the grandeur of the architecture and the glory of the setting. Modern classics like Pierre Paulin lounge chairs and Ingo Mauer pendant fixtures join such contemporary pieces as a BassamFellows daybed and a Kelly Wearstler desk, the ensemble arranged so as not to disturb the pervasive feeling of cloud-borne calm. At the same time, the designers were mindful of placing the furniture in a way that, Meyer notes, “enhances your ability to take it all in.” The overall palette is neutral but far from colorless, comprising mostly blues, grays, and browns. The rust color of the velvet upholstery on a sofa in the den is the boldest hue in the apartment. “We brought in colors from the city and the sky,” Meyer concludes, “so as not to compete with the main event.”

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Inside the Manhattan Penthouse With Expansive Views

meyer davis: anastasia bersetova; lindsay leonard

daniel demarco & associates; premium millwork: woodwork

silverlining: general contractor

jg switzer: beanbags (platform)

contardi: floor lamp

mellah: rug

William Gray: stools (kit­chen)

troscan design: table

gärsnäs: armchairs

erickson æsthetics: lounge chairs (living area)

tibetano: rug

BassamFellows: day­bed

rh: sectionals (living area, terrace)

andrianna shamaris: black side table (living area), console (entry)

jenni kayne: vase (entry)

flos: pen­dant fixture

sacco: rugs (entry, main bedroom)

rw guild: pendant fixtures (hall)

apparatus: sconces (hall, powder room), pendant fixtures (dining area, closet)

armada new york: custom table (dining area)

massproductions: chairs

Allied Maker: pendant fixture (bathroom)

seed design: table lamps (bedroom)

studio dunn: pendant fixture

castel; pollack: daybed fabric, pillow fabrics (den)

Montauk: sectional

ruemmler: pendant fixture

brooklyn workroom: custom daybed (den), custom headboard, custom sofa (main bedroom)

mokum: sectional fab­ric (Den), curtain fabric

menu design shop: mirrors (closet, powder room)

phillip jeffries: wallcovering (closet, powder room)

Gubi: chairs (main bedroom)

blackcreek mercantile & trading co.: coffee table

Ingo Maurer: pendant fixture

perennials fabrics: wallcovering

c&m shade: curtains

benjamin moore & co.: paint

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

Huntsman, Pfau Long, RMW, and SHoP Deliver a Five-Star Campus for Uber Headquarters in San Francisco

It’s been 12 years since Uber disrupted the transportation system with its ride-hailing technology that’s now ubiquitous. Today, the company proves itself another disruptor, this time in workplace architecture and design. Uber’s new San Francisco headquarters is a consortium of four towers, not by one or even two firms, but four internationally renowned studios. Like dating, Uber paired them in a harmonious match. For MB1 and MB2, Uber’s first commissioned ground-up headquarters, SHoP Architects conceived the original building plan, and then RMW came aboard for interiors. Huntsman Architectural Group was mainly responsible for the interiors of MB3 and MB4, originally created on spec by Pfau Long (which has since merged with Perkins&Will). Then Huntsman and RMW collaborated with Uber on the campus master plan. MB, by the way, stands for Mission Bay, the city’s burgeoning, formerly industrial neighborhood. As for stats: MB1 is 11 stories, MB2 seven, including the partially enclosed rooftop, and buildings three and four rise 11 stories each. All told, interiors total just over 1 million square feet and will eventually bring together some 6,000 staffers. “We saw this as an opportunity to unite employees within a campus setting rather than have them scattered throughout the city,” begins Uber director of workplace and real estate Tracie Kelly, who worked alongside project executive Michael Huaco, Uber’s VP of global real estate. As for the design teams? “It was a happy marriage,” Huntsman associate principal Nicole Everett reflects.

On a grand scale, Uber is conceived as a micro-city, one within and connected to the urban area at large where the two pairs of towers align. This micro-city breaks down into boroughs signified by the towers, communities analogous to floors, and neighborhoods as sig­naled by teams. It’s a broad organizational device allowing for—and encouraging—qualities of contributing to a “sense of place bring­ing people together to a positive environment,” Alison Woolf, also a Huntsman associate principal, notes.

Thus everyone, no matter where their location, experiences a shared panoply of indoor-outdoor junctions: public spaces, collaboration areas, and quiet zones in the form of libraries, wellness facilities, terraces, cafés, and break rooms—specifically designed to be communal and active, or focused and calm. Each pair of buildings shares an approximately 30,000-square-foot cafeteria, supplemented by four coffee bars. All together the setting offers a work-from-anywhere scenario, albeit one with dedicated workstations, indicative of an autonomous office paradigm. The fact that each environment presents a uniquely textured fabric induces folks to interconnect and continuously explore the entire campus—much as they would San Francisco’s heterogenous streetscape.

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Given their origins, the two sets of buildings are entirely different. Logic has the introduction start at MB1 and MB2, since the gateway to the campus occurs at the latter. Double-glass facades create layered transparency as a vertical atrium weaving through all floors be­tween the two skins—and a literal and metaphorical connection to the city. The design teams refer to this interstitial space as solariums, for gathering or working. “They give people the choice to choose their own adventure,” SHoP associate principal Shannon Han says. They also add the asset of fresh air. Computer-controlled, operable windows respond to weather conditions creating what she terms “breathing facades.” Yet, adds RMW design principal Hakee Chang, “We were essentially presented with 17 different floor plates due to the various ways in which the solariums engage with the building core.” Unlike typical buildings with a central core, he continues, “Circulation is concentrated along the sides to high­light the bridge connections.” Two reflective glass sky bridges, mirrored on the bottom and visible from outside the buildings, span levels four to six and five to seven with pathways both covered and uncovered.

Inside, the main lobby is a digital experience. “Conduits run from the feature wall behind the 40-foot-long concrete desk, up to the ceiling and along the length of the space,” RMW senior designer Jenna Szczech explains. Then come choices. Grab a coffee or proceed directly to the events space occupying most of the rest of the floor. Like moths to a flame, visitors are pulled to it, since it’s wrapped in a backlit and perforated white screen. Inside, the room is multifunctional and divisible, made so by an accordion-pleated partition that can rise to the ceiling.

These are two of what RMW calls “iconic spaces,” meaning places with campus-wide draw. The cafeteria is another. In MB2, it occupies the entire second floor in a setting every bit the hip restaurant: polished concrete flooring, serpentine white-oak banquettes overlooked by a curvaceous installation of acrylic tubes, and brass floater strips. Up on the sixth floor is the second and main events space. The Forum, preceded by an icy white pre-function environment with a mossy back wall hinting at the rooftop terrace above, counts as an all-hands venue. “The architecture is a beauty,” Szczech states. Indeed it is: a bright, double-height room enclosed on two sides by a floor-to-ceiling window system capped by a grid of skylights.

Work areas, with each team neighborhood introduced by a “front porch” and privy to break rooms, are focused and calm. Quieter still is the cobalt cocoon punctuated by oak and walnut millwork. Sssh, this is the fifth floor’s head’s-down library devoid of any AV component. What’s missing from this complex scenario? Art, as true walls are scarce. For that, all commissioned from locals, cross over to Huntsman’s component. The two buildings face each other across a plaza; MB3 has a terrace off its seventh floor. While the SHoP-RMW parcel has built-in wow factors, “We had to create these spaces after the fact,” Woolf recalls.

For starters, the firm cut through slabs in multiple locations. Now both structures have double-height lobbies, the larger with a slatted wood statement stairway, the smaller a cube framed with dichroic glass tubes, their colors changing according to one’s viewing stance. The ceiling above the bleachers, beneficiary of a cutout between floors four and five, has more fluctuating colors. A double-height break room, itself a novel amenity for the top 10th and 11th floors, has a fiber artwork extending upward over the expanse. Meanwhile, a vibrant, multi-panel painting is installed at the connector stair from yet another break room to the wellness suite.

Uber is particularly proud of this initiative. Almost every floor campus-wide has a mother’s room, but the big push is the mirrored studio for yoga, barre, or dance classes with a bird’s-eye view of the terrace below thanks to glass sliders. There are also adjacent pre- or post-workout chill zones that beckon with hanging wickerlike chairs.

Back inside, the cafeteria serving this part of the quad is anything but corporate. It presents a cheeky take on the green wall with verde tiles. The ceramics combine with stitched, white-bolster fabric to form a dimensional divider between servery and seating. Post-prandial, staffers can head to MB4’s makers’ room for collaborative work or MB3’s library for heads-down work. This version is “a digital and tech-enabled space prompting different neurological stimuli,” Woolf says. Regardless, Huntsman paid some homage to the old-school library format by furnishing it with long tables and carrels. It turns out, some things don’t need disrupting.

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huntsman architectural group: david link; david meckley; rene calara; adam murphy; greg dumont; edna wang; jena kissinger; saruyna leano; amy stock; sierra goetz; hadley bell; patrycja dragan; david hevesi; julio gutierrez; edward sweeney; elias horat; pam robinson; takrit jirawudomchai; joanna heringer; eric nelson

RMW: terry kwik; karen letteney; jin park; owen huang; britni williams; darren barboza; janet braden; sal wikke; oscar catarino; felice rosario; gloria n. rasmussen; annette litle; josh carrell; maurice farinas; jonathan chow; yinong liu

quezada architecture: architect of record (core, shell)

alfa tech: lighting consultant, mep

there: graphics consultant

swa group: landscaping consultant

hush: digital experience design

thornton tomasetti: structural engineer

salter: acoustical engineer

atelier ten: leed consultant, well consultant

acco: mep

mission bell; montbleu: woodwork

concreteworks: concretework

dpr construction; truebeck: general contractors

Yellow Goat Design: custom screen (events space); custom ceiling installation (cafeteria)

steelcase through west elm workspace: bench, tables (lobby)

zehnder rittling: ceiling panels (library)

Interface: carpet tile

Allied Maker: sconces

watson: table

muuto: armchairs

gus modern: side chairs

& Tradition: stools

associated terrazzo co.: flooring (pre-function)

apparatus: pendant fixtures

menu: stools

skandiform: chairs

kristalia: table

filzfelt: acoustic wall panels

designtex: banquette back fabric

Knoll Textiles: banquette seat fabric

minus tio: tables (event space)

arper: stacking chairs

decoustics: ceiling panels

carnegie: wall panel fabric

bendheim: glass panel (break room)

martin brattrud: custom banquettes

global lighting: pendant fixtures (cafeteria)

molo: pendent fixtures: (coffee bar)

goldray industries: dichroic glass panels

pedrali: chairs

west coast industries: tables

muuto: stools (coffee bar, break room, counter)

hbf textiles: cushion fabric (stadium seating)

fermob: chairs (terrace)

kettal: sofas

CB2: tables

landscape forms: custom trellis

woodtech: tables, benches (makers’ room)

solid manufacturing co.: stools

lightolier: ceiling fixtures

ton: chairs (café)

V2 lighting group: pendant fixtures

statements: wall tile

geiger: wall fabric

garret: banquette fabric

sika design: hanging chairs (wellness center)

mafi: flooring

garden trellis co.: custom ceiling

Finelite: linear fixtures

schiavello: screens (library)

turnstone: tables

Hay: chairs

studio trevelyan: pendant fixtures (wellness)

caesarstone: solild surfacing

Mannington Commercial: flooring

grato: wood slats

stone source: stone

dunn-edwards paints: paint