Inside Studio Tre, A Repurposed Photography Studio in Manhattan

Our Home Visit feature takes readers into the private spaces of leading architects, artists, and designers, providing an exclusive glimpse into the architecture, art, landscape, and design that attends their daily lives and highlighting the ways that classical, traditional, and vernacular design can elevate the everyday.

In this issue, we visit the Manhattan studio space of Studio Tre, a design practice founded in 2022 by Whitley Esteban and Ernesto Gloria. The studio embraces design vocabularies from the formal to the folk, from the canonical to the vernacular—and exists comfortably being both.

What was most recently a New York photography studio dating from the 1970s was reconfigured by Studio Tre into an architectural and interiors studio: a place to work, dream, and build together. Flooded with light, taking advantage of the southern exposure, a calm but productive energy pervades this home and laboratory. A place of, and for, our making.

As with all searches, the process of finding this space was something of a hunt. We toured a boatload of other offices and properties. The space had been used by a photographer as his studio & darkroom continually since the 70s, so there was some obvious allure there in terms of the light and it having been home to a creative practice for so long.

Our unique office environment is an ode to the workshop—both the noun and the verb. We realize the ambitions and dreams of our clients in a physical way—it thus makes sense to us that our process itself is analog and tangible, and our studio should be home to that.

We hope our studio provides space for the work we do on the page (or on the screen) to be sensible, practical, and meaningfully informed by the material reality of the world. It is particularly important for the decoration work of the studio—the objects, textiles, colorways—to be able to see and compose these elements in the workspace itself.

The space also features Studio Tre-designed custom furniture in hardworking and durable reclaimed teak and finished with the firm’s three-reeded signature.

The studio's name and emblem carry history and meaning: in nature firstly, and then observed and formalized in the arts and the sciences, things tend to come in threes. We use a triangle everyday and are reminded of this essential building block, this most stable of forms composed of three lines.

We work across both residential and hospitality projects, on both architectural and interior design scope. The restaurant and hotel work means there are no sections of our reference library that get dust—and it keeps our tools very sharp. The residential work, however, is the core of who we are as a studio. Our work serves as the backdrop for the lives and daily moments of our clients—a fundamentally residential approach.

While it might be uncommon to specialize in both, we see each project type benefit from the other. It can be satisfying to work on commercial projects that might be enjoyed by the public. Whatever the project type, we tend to find ourselves working with like-minded people who have a strong point of view about creating places with a sense of belonging and staying rooted in their place and their history.

We’ll admit that Bernard Rudofsky and Christopher Alexander's texts are definitely within closer reach of our desks than De Architectura and The Dancing Column lately. The many vernaculars and folk expressions of building traditions and decorative arts from around the world are something we never tire of and are always learning from.

There is a modesty and a humility to the vernacular, a way of working that ultimately defers to the hand of the craftsman and the builders who actualize what we lay onto the page as drawings. While we aspire for the composition of every design to hum deeply in harmony with the principles of the classical canon—form, proportion, order— there's a verve that emerges when the disciplined meets the improvised. That's where we often find ourselves: at the juncture of high and low, folk and formal.