Rising 50 stories above New York’s Fifth Avenue, opposite the Plaza Hotel and Central Park, the 1968 General Motors Building, designed by Edward Durell Stone, was notably controversial when it was built, causing the demolition of McKim, Mead & White’s Savoy-Plaza Hotel (1927) and interrupting a graceful cluster of early 20th-century chateau-style structures with a modern steel-and-glass skyscraper (one that would house an automobile showroom) clad in faceted white stone. Its prime location has always been a magnet for aspiring businesses, however. Some 55 years later, the GM Building’s tall hexagonal piers and pristine lobby still attract high-profile retailers like Apple, Balenciaga, and Dior to open shops within its base and numerous blue-chip companies—Estée Lauder and wealth-management firms among them—to locate their offices on its upper floors.

In 2019, wanting to maintain the building’s appeal to its well-heeled clientele in a competitive real-estate market—and to help them maintain their employees—current building owner BXP surveyed key occupants to learn what services the tower lacked. According to Hilary Spann, the developer’s New York–region executive vice president, the BXP team then ranked the respondents’ priorities and called on New York–based Fogarty Finger to devise a scheme for an amenity suite that would accommodate them.