For almost three years,  I’ve been handling large-scale partnerships and special projects for design publication Surface Media. But in early 2022, when our CEO Marc Lotenberg was building out the team for Dorsia—an innovative restaurant reservation platform he founded—a few of us started splitting time between the two companies. Surface has been around for 30 years, and it’s a well-oiled machine. We sadly don’t have the print magazine anymore, but we publish on SurfaceMag.com and produce our daily newsletter Design Dispatch, which has everything you need to know in the world of design in a digestible format. Dorsia, meanwhile, is a hospitality tech startup that’s bringing dynamic pricing to the restaurant reservation space. It’s a members-only platform that works directly with top restaurants to secure the hard-to-get tables that are otherwise seemingly impossible. We’re constantly developing new product features and opening new markets, so we’re moving at an extremely fast pace.

Between the two companies, we have a wide range of people from different industries spanning hospitality, tech, media, fashion, finance, and more. Everyone has different working styles, and we needed office spaces in New York and Miami that accommodated all of them.

That’s where we turned to our longtime partner, ROOM, for help.

A No-Brainer Aspirational Brand

I love the ROOM brand—it’s aspirational for an office product. Surface looks at the world through the lens of design, so we wanted to ensure we had something beautiful. That was obviously very important to us. Office products are not always beautiful. So when I found a brand that fit our aesthetic, it was a no-brainer. 

I initially reached out to ROOM in 2021, and I felt an immediate connection to the brand and the team. Surface had a hybrid office / art gallery in the Miami Design District at the time, and a ROOM Phone Booth was essential in making our space functional during the day. We have since written about ROOM’s products and approach to the future of work, and we also partnered on a conceptual design for one of the brand’s Phone Booths with L.A. artist CK Reed.

A Sustainable Alternative to New Construction

In Miami, we recently leased an open-concept, industrial space that was pretty bare bones. Not even a single conference room. We knew we would need the space as Dorsia grew, but we needed to create private zones to accommodate people — like our CEO — who are on calls frequently throughout the day. We didn't have a great solution for that or for small-group meetings. We were going to have to build everything from scratch.

One of the reasons I was attracted to ROOM was their commitment to sustainability. That was absolutely important to us. I liked the choice of materials, the sustainable practices and the beauty of the brand itself. I knew by choosing them for this project, there was no need to build rooms out of drywall. And thus, no environmental waste (or the headache of dealing with a big construction project).

Expertise in Space Planning

It was great working with the ROOM team because they’re the experts on this. We got their eyes on our plans, and they helped us lay out a serie