Strange Family designs its Brooklyn live-work studio as a hotel brand

Behind a set of carved wooden double doors at number 348, in a Park Slope brownstone built in 1920, two floors of intricate millwork, paned glass, clawfoot bathtubs and creaky wood floors make up Strange House. The live-work studio belongs to Strange Family, the international creative and technology company with bases in New York, San Francisco and Guadalajara, and it serves as the agency’s Brooklyn home – a place where its distributed teams and visiting collaborators can meet, work and stay. “What if we designed an office like a boutique hotel?” recalls Ben McNutt, Founder & Executive Creative Director. “That was the inspiration for Strange House.” The thinking didn’t start there, though. Strange Family had let go of its traditional San Francisco office during the pandemic and successfully transitioned to a hybrid model, but McNutt found himself thinking following a 2023 lunch with David Galullo, CEO & CCO of interior architecture firm Rapt Studio. Galullo had made the case that companies should also be reimagining apartments – treating them as the workspace, living space and social space they had effectively become. “That stuck with me,” McNutt admits. The question turned from what kind of office Strange Family needed to what kind of space it actually wanted. From there, the Chelsea Hotel emerged as a point of inspiration. The bygone-era residential hotel housed artists and the avant-garde in messy proximity – the kind of irreverent retreat that McNutt describes as “a perfect fusion of heritage and mischief.” The identity needed to reflect the brownstone as well. A building with its own grammar, which Strange Family wanted to honour.