May 8, 2026 |
How is making a magazine akin to building a home? For creative director Alex Wiederin, the process is more familiar than you might have initially thought.
Austria-born but now based in Manhattan, the founder of the creative agency Buero New York has spent more than two decades helping brands shape their storytelling in advertisement campaigns, through books and across editorials. Whether it’s Bvlgari, Cartier, Givenchy or this very magazine (Wiederin is 10’s consulting creative director), Buero’s polished creative eye provides the building blocks for strong brand identities to flourish. But never did he think he’d design someone’s house.
From left: the one-tonne bronze front door; a generously sized day bed in the living room
It all started over dinner at Glacis Beisl, Vienna, in August 2019. “I was with a client who I usually do corporate identities for. He showed me floor plans of this New York apartment he’d just purchased and asked me what I thought,” says Wiederin. “I looked at him and said, ‘Well, if you don’t want to have a laundry room, if you don’t want to have a wall where you can hang art, if you don’t want to have a real kitchen, it’s fine. But if you want to have all of these things, they don’t exist here.’ I took a napkin and drew what I would do and he looked at me and said, ‘You have the job. Please do this.’”
He wasn’t fazed by the challenge. “The way I see things is it doesn’t matter if it’s two-dimensional, three-dimensional, it’s always the orchestration between positive and negative space,” he says. “I love different materials and it just really all made sense to me to take the project on.”
The home in question is a penthouse apartment in Tribeca inside a building named Hope. Its ground floor is spread across 3,484 sq ft, ascending to an upper level of 1,000 sq ft. Each room has its own private terrace, with landscapes inspired by the vegetation that grows around upstate New York. The whole thing makes for a hidden oasis in the heart of Lower Manhattan.
The kitchen and dining area expands into an outdoor breakfast bar
Although he has previously devised store concepts for the likes of Helmut Lang and beauty brand Oribe, Wiederin had never designed a living environment for a client prior to the project. “The Tribeca penthouse marks my first residential project of this scale and represents a natural extension of my practice from editorial design and communication into spatial architecture,” he says.
The pad took two and a half years to design and build, with Wiederin working alongside architect Jonathan Schloss and Viennese interior architect Gregor Eichinger to fully realise the project. The trio were initially guided by pioneering Austrian-Czechoslovakian architect Adolf Loos, who through the 1920s and ’30s crafted the framework for postmodern architectural design. The flat adopts a spatial layout, one driven by rhythm and proportion. It’s like shaping an editorial page of a magazine, says Wiederin. Though “volumes replace letters and materials replace ink, the underlying logic remains the same”.
Works by local artists flank art deco and bauhaus furniture
“My philosophy of ‘form follows function’ informed every design decision,” he continues. “This principle, rooted in both communication design and modern architecture, ensured that every element in the apartment – whether structural or aesthetic – served a clear purpose. This approach defined the dialogue between architecture, material and the way the space is experienced.”
There are fluid, transformative qualities to the flat. In the living room, American walnut panels, carved by Austrian woodworkers, can be moved to both conceal a television and reveal an elegant fireplace in one swift movement, while floor-to-ceiling windows can be fully opened to evoke an indoor-outdoor environment. Each bathroom, crafted from calacatta verde marble from Florence, is equipped with adjustable, mirrored shelving and metal magazine holders that are integrated into the wall and can be moved to their desired positioning thanks to a line cut-out that snakes around the space.
The cooking set-up is adaptable, too. There is a division wall that can be closed to hide the kitchen from the dining room, and once the windows are fully opened, the counter can be extended into an outdoor breakfast bar that’s perfect for hosting friends on balmy summer nights. “It’s really about trying to utilise space to the maximum,” says Wiederin.
Custom-built bedrooms come with private terraces and leather-lined wardrobes
Outdoor landscapes are inspired by vegetation that grows around upstate New York, while marble bathrooms populate the flat
The vast open space is complemented with a handsome material make-up that has a distinctly New York feel. At the entrance of the property you’re greeted by a one-tonne bronze door, cast directly against a living birch tree in upstate New York. “It shimmers with the light, it’s really beautiful,” Wiederin says. An outdoor fireplace is accented by stones handpicked upstate and bronze-cast boulders, while supple leather dresses the insides of the wardrobes.
Throughout the space, originals from emerging local artists sit alongside works by the greats, such as Andy Warhol and Keith Haring. The furniture is mostly art deco and bauhaus, and includes striking modernist chairs by Jindřich Halabala and a generously sized day bed in the living room that’s ideal for lazing the weekend away.
American walnut panels feature throughout the space
How did his client react when he saw the space? “It was actually super funny because his wife came first, and they have quite an amazing house in Vienna. She came with their kids, staying there just for a couple of nights in transit before they went somewhere else. She called me and said, ‘You know what? You created something which is frightening, because my kids were saying: why do we not live like this in Austria?’ That was a really nice compliment, I have to say.”
Who would’ve thought the same set of tools that are used to magic up the mags that line our local newsagents could be applied to building the sort of dream home worthy of its own double-page spread? Very meta indeed.
Photography courtesy of Alice Gao. Taken from 10 Men Issue 63 – CLASSIC, CRAFT, NOSTALGIA – out now. Order your copy here.
