Artisan, a Hybrid Brokerage and Design Firm, Is Shaking Things Up in the Office Space

Getting a new office is a lot of work. You need a real estate agent to find a place and negotiate the lease, a designer to conceptualize the furnishings and plan, and a project manager to handle the build-out. When Dani Arps and Sarah Pontius met in 2019, they were both exhausted by this baroque system. Could they, with their respective expertise as an interior designer and a real estate broker, find a way to solve the problem? When the pandemic hit, they suddenly had some time to think it through.

Such was the genesis of Artisan, a new hybrid business that does it all. “We want to be your one point of contact,” explains Arps, who had previously conceived offices for start-ups like Daily Harvest, Codecademy, and General Assembly. Artisan’s first client was the nonprofit Malala Fund, which wanted to transition from a Washington, D.C., coworking space to an office of its own—something airy, flexible, and amped up with texture and pattern. Pontius swooped in to help the organization negotiate the lease (it had already found the spot) and Arps managed the project, making do with the modest budget, mixing statement pieces like a walnut conference table and cushy sofas with lots of plants. For its next big account, Union Square Ventures, Artisan oversaw the process from start to finish.

Now Artisan’s growing client list includes the fashion brand The Row, the economic-justice collaborative Living Cities, and a Fortune 500 company. All have thrilled at the prospect of efficiency. After offices communicate their pro-grammatic needs (location, scale, style), an Artisan interior designer calculates the required square footage and does test fits in different spaces. “We’re merging the design process into the brokerage process in order to take down the timeline overall,” says Arps.

As the way we work continues to transform, she, Pontius, and their growing team of eight are also serving as trusted advisers. “The transition from home to office has been difficult for people,” explains Pontius. “Companies are trying to create environments where people want to come back but are not forced to come back.” artisanalliance.co