Sandow to open new office in midtown Manhattan

Furniture Today Staff -- Furniture Today, December 12, 2012

NEW YORK — Sandow, the parent company of Furniture/Today and a leader in building multiplatform brands that meet at the intersection of luxury and design, has signed a lease with Rockefeller Group for nearly 40,000 square feet of space in midtown Manhattan's iconic Time-Life Building.

The company will occupy the entire 17th floor of the building, at 1271 Avenue of the Americas, when the new office opens in the spring, said Adam I. Sandow, chairman and CEO.

In addition to Furniture/Today, Home Accents Today, Casual Living and Kids Today, Sandow's brands include NewBeauty, Interior Design, Worth, Fred Segal, Luxe Interiors + Design, Culture + Commerce and Material ConneXion. Its businesses span digital and print media, licensing, consulting, e-commerce/retail, business information and marketing services.

Sandow has more than 400 employees in 14 offices around the world, with more staff in New York than anywhere else, including the company's corporate headquarters in Boca Raton, Fla., where it recently moved into a new 30,000-square-foot office.

Architecture and design firm Gensler will design the New York space. Cindy Allen, editor-in-chief of Interior Design, is collaborating with Sandow and Gensler on the look of the offices. The company worked with David Falk and Jason Greenstein from real estate advisory firm Newmark Grubb Knight Frank on its search.

"It was critical to find a single floorplate that would allow us to have all of our brands in one place," said Sandow. "David and his team at Newmark did an extraordinary job in leading us to one of the most iconic buildings in New York, which will position us for our next phase of development."

Through a series of acquisitions and aggressive growth, Sandow had increased its headcount in New York by more than 600% since 2010 and had been operating out of two separate Manhattan offices.

The offices will feature the world's largest materials library created by Sandow subsidiary Material ConneXion, a global materials consultancy. The library will house more than 7,000 advanced and sustainable materials curated by the company's team of material scientists and experts, led by Dr. Andrew Dent. In addition, a gallery and event space will feature a rotating series of exhibitions on art, materials and innovation.
"On a daily basis, our company's cross-section of brands interacts with so many creative minds from around the world - from industrial designers, to CEOs of some of the world's largest luxury companies, as well as groundbreaking architects and interior designers," said Michele Caniato, president of Sandow companies Culture + Commerce and Material ConneXion. "This new location will serve as a place where all of this talent can converge, collaborate and help stimulate innovation and new business ideas."

The space will also include a Fred Segal concept studio, designed to test and mock up store designs, fixtures and merchandising ideas, and a video studio that will enable each brand to create in-house video content to be distributed through various channels.

"We have so much to look forward to with fabulous new digs-designed by Gensler, with whom we've had a very long relationship. The new space will give us an exciting opportunity to create community and success together as a company," said Interior Design's Allen.