Highline Rooftop
HIGHLINE HIGHPOINT
The task of designing a luxurious rooftop garden for a penthouse takes on heightened import when the apartment in question crowns the famous Zaha Hadid building at the Highline. But we relished the assignment, designing a space with custom elements inspired by Hadid's curvilinear forms and playful spirit.
ROOFTOP SPA
Custom carved treads, with embedded lighting, lead from an elevated plunge pool to a sauna clad in wood torched to create an alligator skin texture. The sauna mirror reflects the sky, and echoes the not-quite-spherical, almost elemental shape of the pool
SUNSHADE & NIGHTLIGHT
The tables, the pavers, the steps, and the pool are all carved from the same block of jet-mist granite, treated to create a variety of textures, producing a gratifying material coherence without uniformity.
The sofa, the barbecue island, and the canopy are all made from thermaformed Corian, allowing total expression of our design vision. It's in the canopy that this vision takes flight. The underside of the canopy bears thousands of undulating perforations that take on the shape of a cloud when the sun is shining. At night, light shines through to create a glowing, floating, sculptural delight.
Because of our modular experience and our advanced digital capacities, DF&A can design complex geometrical architectural elements and shepherd them through digital fabrication. That means we can create whatever a project calls for both structurally and aesthetically, whether it’s a hyperbolic curved Corian canopy or a brass screenwall that promotes both visibility and privacy. We have the skill, the experience, and the sense of unlimited creative potential that make all things possible.
Renovating this Chelsea apartment meant reconciling two seemingly competing goals: preserving the “lofty” feel of the space — the spare geometry and the high ceilings —and creating a warm and inviting home. In the kitchen and dining area, we installed dark walnut cabinetry and dropped the ceiling to create a more intimate space set aside from the dining room. The luster of the kitchen millwork is mirrored in the dining area’s brass chandelier, whose angular shape is softened by a warm color and gentle sheen.
Our prototype hotel room for MiTek’s modular initiative reflects our passionate belief that modular technology should serve architectural design, not supersede it. Creativity and formal expression are still possible within the parameters of factory production; efficiency does not preclude beauty.
