The second floor houses a showroom with a full kitchen and offices for Design Republic’s 40-person staff. The upper floors serve as the new home for Neri & Hu Design and Research Office, the couple’s expanding architecture firm, which currently has 70 employees and is designing projects in China, the U.S., the Philippines, Singapore, and Mexico. The architects liken their new headquarters to an airplane’s “black box,” because it stores vital information about where their firm has been and what direction it is headed.

Neri and Hu designed the interiors as a combination of white open spaces and textured boxes clad with materials such as yellow glass (for Design Republic’s conference room) and white gypsum board and oak (for the architecture firm’s conference room, which consists of a pair of stacked boxes). The  architects connected spaces vertically inside the building by creating views down and up through the interiors. So people can look into the NHDRO conference room, for example, from an upper level. They also connected the interiors horizontally, designing a bridge linking one side of the building to the other and using lots of glass partitions.

The couple kept the needs of their employees in mind when designing the interiors, creating spaces that encourage collaboration and accommodating a range of activities such as working, thinking, eating, and even relaxing.