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In deciding to move to new quarters in Manhattan, Maverick Real Estate Partners wanted to make sure its staff would relish returning to the office after the less regimented work-from-home days of the pandemic. “We did not want it to be stodgy,” says Maverick co-founder Ted Martell. “And we hoped to encourage different ways of working collaboratively.”

The company asked AE Superlab, a small 10-year-old Brooklyn architecture firm, to come up with a versatile scheme for the 8,000-square-foot space on the top floor of 330 Madison Avenue.

The brief called for an open-plan interior without private offices—not even for Martell and the other cofounder, David Aviram. Also needed were rooms of different sizes, for conferences, small meetings, and private phone conversations, as well as areas for casual interaction.

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Walnut accents the open office area (1) and clads the elevator lobby (2). Photos © AE Superlab / Ahmed Elhusseiny, click to enlarge.

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On top of the programmatic punch list was the question of identity. Maverick, a private equity fund manager that deals in commercial properties, asked that the design reflect the technological acumen behind its proprietary data services. Furthermore, its institutionally grounded investors should apprehend a sort of “gravitas,” as AE Superlab’s principal, Ahmed ElHusseiny, a Cairo-born and MIT-trained architect, puts it. Yet the interiors needed to speak to the company’s ingenuity and imagination, without trying too hard to be playful, à la Silicon Valley. Instead of ping-pong tables—a staple of corporate kindergartens—visitors encounter a stately but scintillating space where a sleek, monolithic data screen rises like an ancient stele near the entrance foyer.

The building itself is a typical glass-and-steel 39-story high-rise designed by Kahn & Jacobs in 1965—a far cry from the polychromed Art Deco towers that the elder partner Ely Jacques Kahn was famous for in the 1920s. Yet 330 Madison has two strong advantages: its location near Grand Central Terminal and other Midtown venues, and the floor’s wraparound views of distinctive traditional and modern towers nearby.

Accordingly, AE Superlab’s scheme heightened access to the glassed-in perimeter from all parts of the office. Visitors enter from an elegant elevator core on the west side of the floor plate; once in the foyer, they find spaces gradually open up toward the east edge in a series of increasingly transparent zones. An “innovation” room—a polygonal volume cranked at an angle—lies directly ahead. However, curved glass expanses enclosing it allow visual permeability to the cityscape, even with the presence of an audiovisual wall.

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The kitchen (3) and seating along the glass-walled perimeter (4) also offer places for relaxed interaction. Photos © AE Superlab / Ahmed Elhusseiny

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The foyer separates the floor into two general areas, one for the workstations—backed by a boomerang-shaped, elongated desk for the two partners on the south side—the other for more relaxing interaction, including a kitchen/pantry and a leafy indoor “garden.” In demarcating these different areas, AE Superlab hung woody acoustic baffles set within curved aluminum frames below an exposed slab of concrete beams and pressboard ceiling, all painted black. Offering an elegant counterpart to this darker domain overhead is the polished, cementitious flooring into which expanses of light-toned carpeting are inserted. “We wanted to bring together the rough and the raw with the refined and the detailed,” ElHusseiny says. As part of the latter effect, LED tubes stringently delineate the architectural elements and spaces both horizontally and vertically in an uninterrupted curving flow of glowing illumination. Vertical, loop-shaped door pulls of stainless steel echo the curvilinear motif and help stiffen the slender, ½-inch-thick glass of the 9-foot-high doors.

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Off the foyer are conference rooms (5) and a “garden” lounge (6). Photos © AE Superlab / Ahmed Elhusseiny

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Amid the variegated materials, walnut assumes a dominant role, sheathing the elevator core and walls, as well as certain columns and furnishings including a singular, ovoid pedestal for a vase in the foyer. The wood’s warm tones and natural character, along with the lush leaves of rubber, coffee, and ficus plants, contrast markedly with the cool, machinelike quality of the LED tubes and the black steel beams that stretch between columns to act as counters for informal exchanges.

Black steel beams stretch between columns to act as counters for informal exchanges. Photos © AE Superlab / Ahmed Elhusseiny

Other textures abound: taupe-tinged wool felt lines the walls of private phone rooms that cosset users with corduroy-upholstered banquettes; a Brazilian quartzite stone countertop and backsplash dramatize the kitchen/pantry; the main conference room features a marble table and caramel-colored chairs, bathed in light from a suspended, elongated fixture of polycarbonate ocher leaves.

In toto, the choice of furniture, particularly mid-20th-century chairs and tables, complemented by the subtle complexity of the architectural elements, creates a striking setting. As it shifts smoothly from one area to another, the office reinforces the requirements of Maverick’s program, while providing a distinctive ambience that appears to animate the staff in its daily routines.