Inside Mouthwash Studio’s Pattern-Drenched New York Office

Since its unlikely transformation at the hands of savvy developers, the WSA Building has emerged as a magnet for Lower Manhattan’s creative class, drawing marquee tenants such as Bode and Ghetto Gastro while hosting successive editions of the Collectible design fair. That lineage makes Mouthwash Studio a natural addition. Since being launched in Los Angeles by Abraham Campillo, Mackenzie Freemire, and Alex Tan, and joined by partner Ben Mingo, the multidisciplinary creative firm has amassed an enviable client roster that includes Nike, Fender, and The North Face, and recently extended its practice into hospitality by opening the buzzy Café Tondo nearby in Chinatown. 

The firm’s debut New York office marks a pivotal eastward expansion as its profile continues to rise. “As a founder, it’s a very conscious decision to invest in physical space at a time when more and more companies are moving away from it,” Campillo says. “Seeing the benefits of having an inspirational space in L.A. made us want to invest in a New York office where we now have just as many employees.” But at a tight 237 square feet, the workspace they selected ended up posing unique spatial challenges they entrusted Adam Charlap Hyman and his firm, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, to address with clever interventions and soulful touches.

Rather than defaulting to the neutral commercial finishes typical of high-rise offices, Charlap Hyman & Herrero leaned into pattern-drenching as a more-is-more tool for perceptual expansion that also softened the severity of its skyscraper setting. “We were thinking about the way that a patterned carpet could expand the space visually and distort its scale,” Charlap Hyman explains. “With a confusing-enough pattern and the odd shape, you could lose track of how small the room actually is.” Antique Persian rugs stitched wall to wall achieve that effect, flowing seamlessly from the floor into cushions and a draped sofa fabricated from its remnants.

The room’s odd trapezoidal footprint further complicated orientation, but a wealth of sculptural keepsakes and antiques eliminate any vertigo. Stainless steel desks fabricated by Riley Duncan trace the window line and back wall, their reflective surfaces amplifying daylight and drawing eyes out toward the Brooklyn Bridge. Matching shelving holds a rotating assortment of books, magazines, and handmade ceramics. Elsewhere, an antique Chinese writing table with marble inlay and a hand-hammered copper side table introduce material contrast while a 17th-century Venetian Baroque landscape by Bartolomeo Pedon lends gallery-like panache.

A particularly considered gesture appears via a Victorian oval mirror embedded in a carpet-wrapped column. The detail reads almost as a porthole, subtly recalling Mouthwash’s Los Angeles office, where a wooden phone booth incorporates a circular opening with a sliding panel. Charlap Hyman frames the connection as organic with a wink. “It wasn’t deliberate, but the language of the other office was very front of mind,” he says. He points to shared history with Noam Saragosti, co-founder of Aunt Studio, which designed the Los Angeles counterpart and previously worked for Charlap Hyman & Herrero as a studio director. “We’ve all remained close. Maybe there’s a language we’ve all been developing together.” 

That sense of continuity manifests in how Mouthwash articulates its relationships through objects. As in Los Angeles, the New York office highlights collaborative endeavors, with shelves displaying a Clam Shell Lamp by Charlap Hyman & Herrero created with Green River Project alongside a paper, plaster, and silver nitrate sculpture designed with Shun Kinoshita for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Yet the material register shifts decisively. Where the other office leaned on home-like details like knotty wood furnishings, translucent glass block walls, and chain mail accents, the New York outpost sharpens its palette in response to its setting. Black Formica surfaces and exposed steel reference the office tower itself; rugs and pillows temper the room’s edges. 

The workspace spans periods, styles, geographies—a thrilling visual mix that enables the type of design thinking Mouthwash has leveraged to influence culture in the past. “Our belief is that if there are more than five people working out of one city, they deserve an inspiring place to gather and do their work,” Campillo says. “The spaces we spend our time in have a deep impact on us, and the things and people around us reflect back to us. As a studio, we really value time together. There’s a quote from James Clear that sums up what we’re trying to achieve: ‘Success is being excited to go to work and being excited to come home.’” Even in a space scarcely larger than a freight elevator, the studio distills that ethos into a concentrated tableau that suggests scale needn’t inhibit ambition when ideas lead the way.