On the 14th floor of a Park Avenue high rise, overlooking Grand Central Station in the heart of Manhattan, is GFP Real Estate’s new office. As landlords for much of New York’s office buildings, GFP needed their own space to reflect their culture and serve as an example to tenants. The Main GFP office already resided on the 5th floor of this same building and also on the 12th floor so larger functions such as the board room and other meeting space was already provided elsewhere and did not need to be incorporated into our design. Despite the current trend towards open office plans, they still needed a considerable number of offices.
More than half the office square footage had to be allocated to enclosed offices. Our challenge was to create an environment that felt communal and connected while still giving executives their acoustic privacy. Our first approach was to centralize the offices and leave the edges of the space open to allow light and views in for all the staff but the sheer quantity of offices made this scheme warren-like and contrarily worked to disperse staff which was not what we wanted. The final solution was to flank the main space with office, group staff centrally around a long desk space and to counter that compactness, provide a fun and enjoyable cafe space that felt like it was almost like going out for lunch.