Simply Ordering Your Personal Bjarke Ingels–Designed Residence Will Quickly Be a Actuality

When some of the brightest stars in their fields join forces to overhaul a long-outdated system, it’s going to make noise. Case in point: Roni Bahar, WeWork’s former director of development; Bjarke Ingels, principal at his namesake multidisciplinary design firm; and Nick Chim, former head of Sidewalk’s Model Lab—experts in real estate, architecture, and tech, respectively—whose new start-up, Nabr, offers formerly unattainable sustainable luxury to the masses. And since raising a whopping $14 million in seed funding and an ambitious plan to deliver 100,000 stylish eco-conscious units globally, the trio has hit the ground running, to say the least. “We see ourselves as a development company that approaches real estate from a product standpoint,” Bahar notes. And that product is completely customizable from just about any angle.

Last week, the tech-backed start-up officially launched with Nabr’s first apartment building, the BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group–codesigned 125-unit SoFA One—named for its prime spot in San Jose’s colorful arts district, South of First Area, and inspired by the 100-year-old lofts in New York City’s Tribeca and SoHo neighborhoods. “Lofts have structural flexibility, and our idea is to offer 21st-century lofts in a base building that has a lot of character. There’s a lot of soul to work with: material, texture, and warmth,” Ingels says. SoFA One won’t open its doors to residents until the summer of 2023, but the waitlist is very much up and running, giving potential residents a taste of the environmentally conscious style that comes with a Nabr-backed unit. One such guilt-free benefit is the abundance of View glass, which adapts its transparency to the weather.

And while Ingels designed this development and will design more as Nabr swiftly sweeps across the world in the coming years, the start-up is bringing on a roster of visionary talent, including self-taught Barcelona-based Katty Schiebeck. She will be infusing Nabr-approved developments with her signature Scandinavian minimalism–meets–contemporary Spanish look, which she has described as simultaneously welcoming and austere. Schiebeck says, “During our creative process for Nabr, we were able to choose no more than four materials to reduce our impact.”