Atema Architecture

09/16/2025

01/10/2025

Thank you for your thoughtful, in-depth story on our project! This was the kind of collaboration between client, builder, and us as architects that allows a project to achieve a really special depth and resonance, and was a pleasure to be part of from our initial conceptual conversations to our clients’ move in! I just had New Year’s Eve dinner there, and was so gratified to be able to participate in the life of their family and see how the home we created together allows for these kinds of very beautiful experiences.

Thanks also to Eric, Vinny, and the whole team at Blushi Construction for transforming our ideas into reality! They approached every day they worked there with a solution-oriented, open-minded, and collaborative mindset that allowed the project run as smoothly as it did.

Photos by Brownstoner/Susan de Vries.

https://www.brownstoner.com/interiors-renovation/bed-stuy-brownstone-reno-eclectic-design-art/

04/24/2024

We’re deep in design on our project, reimagining the loft-like living and dining rooms with their sweeping Central Park views as a series of smaller implied “rooms” defined largely by lighting and furniture. This allows us to maintain the light-flooded beauty of the space and the connection to the huge eastern and southern views throughout while providing a range of more intimate and inviting places for the owners and their grown children and friends to enjoy.

The large south-facing kitchen is being transformed with a lighter material palette, more discreet but ample storage, and a more functional breakfast area defined by a small peninsula extension of the main counter, with adjacent coffee/breakfast station.

We’re also reworking the primary suite to maintain its big park view and connection to its terrace, while creating separate defined areas for sleeping and reading/relaxing/working, and making the primary bathroom lighter and more open, with lots of clean hidden storage and a discreet high transom to pull in daylight.

12/03/2023

Yard work…Stone yard visits are important parts of many projects to explore material options with our clients, go over the stone fabrication and installation process, and select specific slabs.

In this case, our clients for our project, & Nikola Barisic, introduced me to a yard I hadn’t worked with before - , run by a friend of theirs, and I was impressed by the extent of their fabrication abilities and machinery they’ve invested in to make this possible. It also turns out their company did much of the stone work for Grand Central Terminal back in 1913 and later the Empire State Building, so they bring serious old school expertise to the table too!

11/15/2023

Flood light…Late fall sunlight floods deep into our project, where our clients are now moved in, providing that last, critical dimension of energy and personality to the environment we created with them and for them.

The eleven foot ceilings of the parlor floor, with its south-facing wall of massive high-performance sliding doors, saturates the space with light and reveals the soft texture of the lime-painted walls and original 125-year old pocket doors and casings.

The kitchen has a south-facing wall of sliding glass doors opening directly to the garden, and is organized around the custom marble counter with rounded corners and large integrated marble sink, balanced by the rounded corners of the custom plaster hood enclosure over the La Cornue induction range.

Bathrooms use a range of paint colors, wallpapers, and handmade tiles unique to each, with windows, skylights, and lighting used to highlight the varying textures and tones of these palettes.

11/02/2023

High plains drifters…I went out to meet our client and builder in northern Nebraska to walk the land and select the exact location and orientation of our project. This turned out to be over fifty feet closer to the canyon from where we’d originally planned it, so it’ll now be tucked behind a small slope at the edge of the high prairie, allowing the house to nestle into a small flat area just before the cliff drops steeply to the river 250 feet below.
To help in this siting process, Jeremy, our builder, brought in a boom truck so we could experience what the future elevated deck would feel like and optimize its location. That was a little adventure for someone who doesn’t always love heights, but absolutely valuable, and the views…!

08/10/2023

Night & Day: For this office project, designed during the middle of the pandemic, we found much of our inspiration in living rooms and hotel lounges, as our goal was to create a space that Endeavor’s staff and extended community would want to come to without any prompting or mandates. All carrot no stick: just make a great environment people wanted to be in, that could support the hybrid, more fluid work culture that is still evolving now. Whether you’d want to do quiet heads-down work away from home but be around other people, or socialize, or have a home base while passing through NY, do a meeting, or go to or host an event, we wanted this to be a space that could accommodate and inspire all of it.

The space is a large L shape on the 53rd floor of the Gordon Bunshaft/SOM-designed former HQ of Chase Manhattan Bank, facing both north all the way uptown, and east over the East River, the bridges, and all of Brooklyn. We kept it largely open but roughly divided into three areas: the entry lounge where we exposed and polished the original concrete slab floor and put in a kitchen/bar as the welcome to the office, then a big shared table-focused work area mixed in with informal seating, and after the CEO’s glass corner office/meeting room (with near-perfect views of the three bridges, which you can see in the dusk photo) the rest is a big loungey plant-filled living room with a low, comfortable mix of sofas, chairs, poufs, and coffee tables.

07/27/2023

: How to totally transform a triplex and create two bedrooms from one in the process…
We dove in deeply with the design of this originally dark and claustrophobic warren of rooms (the before photos give a sense of this!) in a legendary Village coop just off University Place.
A complete rethinking of this apartment allowed us to locate an office and reading area mezzanine to look onto a double-height living and dining room with extra-tall doors and transoms leading to a balcony. We also created a highly-functional cook-friendly kitchen under the office. The stair to the mezzanine and lower level wraps a bathroom and hides storage, while two bedrooms with a bathroom on the lower level open to an outdoor courtyard garden.

07/08/2023

Lush life: sharing a few snaps of the new light- and plant-filled offices we recently completed for Incandescent just off Madison Square Park.

07/05/2023

The tub room got it’s tub! Our client found this massive vintage enamelled iron clawfoot piece upstate, which we’ve modified to accept more modern plumbing for our project. It’s sitting on a leaf-patterned tile floor with radiant heat, and above the wainscot wall panels are custom fluted marble panels.

We’re also stripping the paint off the original 9’H wood French pocket doors that divide the parlor floor’s N and S living rooms, and installing the deck off the parlor floor living room to provide a perfect perch for enjoying a book and a drink while looking over the backyard.

06/02/2023

We had so much fun working with the whole team at TED to create their super flexible HQ office that pinwheeled around a multipurpose theater-in-the-round, which also served as an impromptu event space (“hey, Malcolm Gladwell’s coming through town and wants to stop by this afternoon - let’s have him do a talk while he’s here!”), a quiet work area, a reception waiting area, a lunch hangout, and an informal meeting space!

The raw space seen in the 2nd photo shows the seriously massive mushroom column “bones” we had to work with, and we ran with it, turning them into major characters in the space that the flexible “soft” architecture played off of..
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05/23/2023

Tonight was a design show double header to see both Nina Seirafi’s meticulously crafted new furniture collection at Ralph Pucci and the otherworldly beauty of Apparatus’ studio.

I’ve had the privilege of working with Nina, and her Lava coffee table - with its solid carved lava stone top - is a discreetly elegant tour de force that anchors a great collection of seating and tables that marries elemental geologic forms with high craft.

Entering the Apparatus showroom/design studio is a trip to another universe, an immersive series of spaces with their distinctive lighting and furniture woven throughout the narrative, all also highlighting the astonishing range of finishes they’ve developed.