ALA was founded in 2017 when groundbreaking co-working platform The Wing tapped Alda to design its East Coast and California locations. ALA continues to serve a growing number of entrepreneurs and startups as well as established organizations looking to rethink traditional retail, healthcare, office, and cultural spaces. ALA is a recognized thought leader in biophilic design and has been featured nationally and internationally in publications such as Metropolis, Contract, Interior Design, etc.
The New York-based studio’s long list of clients includes Bloomberg, Red Bull, Princeton University, Rent the Runway, Christian Louboutin and women’s healthcare platform, Tia.
While ALA’s projects range from those with multi-million dollar construction budgets to start-ups building their very first headquarters, they all share ALA’s minimalist and playful design vocabulary, and seamlessly combine comfort, wellness, smart planning and fresh interior design concepts.
To arrive at these thoughtful, custom solutions, ALA treats each as an opportunity to foster a client’s creativity. Because the studio often gives form to services and business models that have few spatial precedents, it starts each project with a discovery phase in which an organization’s founders, team members, and users share their individual experiences with that brand; ALA’s ethnographic research becomes the basis of programming and functionality, as well as concepts for layouts and finishes.
Alda and her team pride themselves on deep listening and hands-on collaboration in this process, and the studio is committed to expressing every commission’s potential within the constraints of time and budget.