Photos: Nicholas Calcott
On an upper floor of 335 Madison, a 29-story glass-and-granite office building across the street from New York’s Grand Central Terminal, there’s an austere space painted all white, spotted with communal desks, low couches, and minimalist chairs. Potted snake plants and fiddle-leaf fig trees provide decoration, and copies of Kinfolk magazine fan out across coffee tables. A large sculpture by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami towers in a corner, awaiting its move to the lobby, currently under construction.
The environment is closer to a massive coffee shop than a standard midtown workplace, but that’s exactly what 335 Madison, now branded as The Company Building, is trying to sell—specifically as office space for tech companies. (What’s defined as technology is loose; tenants range from co-living start-ups to manufacturers.) It’s meant to look homey, “like your cool friend’s apartment,” says Paris Smith, Company’s head of brand, on a recent tour of the in-progress renovation, which was sensitively designed by SHoP Architects in close collaboration with the building’s owners, Milstein Properties. “Our whole vision really comes from the concept of making the workplace feel like your favorite hotel,” Smith explains.
In tech-industry parlance, “full stack” denotes an engineer who can handle all levels of software design, from user experience to back-end databases. The Company Building offers a kind of full-stack commercial architecture: It contains space and amenities for every size of business, from a dedicated coworking area on the 16th floor for solo start-ups to self-contained offices on the fifth through seventh, up to the empty higher floors, which are marketed for much larger businesses to take over, as Facebook has on the 17th.
The ready-made office spaces are all already operational; only one remained empty at the time of my tour in December. As a business grows (or shrinks), Company makes it easy to change offices on demand like a hermit crab swapping shells. As Uber is to cars or Airbnb is to apartments, “this is real estate as a service,” says Alexi Nazem, whose start-up Nomad Health moved through six different spaces in the building as it grew from five employees to 90. “It allows me to focus on growing my company.”
Company will also become a home away from home when the rest of its amenities are finished over the course of this year, with the gym due to open by early 2021. Smith compares the building to the campuses of the largest tech companies like Google and Apple, which feature perks like free cafeterias, fitness centers, and doctors’ offices inside the corporate confines. But rather than have to pay for all these services, Company’s tenants get them along with their space in the building. The completed design features a pool, spas, and workout areas, as well as cafés, restaurants, and bars. Company will operate all of the on-site facilities, so tenants can offer chosen staff members corporate accounts, perhaps as a way of sweetening a job offer. A forthcoming retail area off the lobby will provide stall space for smaller local brands, or even direct-to-consumer start-ups in the building, where they can market-test products.
Smith describes it as a “day-to-night concept.” Not only do the start-ups never have to move out, the employees never have to leave. The suburban corporate campuses of midcentury and the faux-utopian Silicon Valley compounds are thus transposed to the fabric of midtown Manhattan, a place where it’s usually hard to be as self-enclosed as The Company Building. The lower areas might be public, but they’re public in the manner of a hotel—an advertisement for what you don’t have access to, and a way to keep tenants spending money while feeling a superficial sense of connection to the outside world.