Like other North American cities grappling with the rise of remote and hybrid work, New York City has a glut of unused and aging office buildings. It also suffers from a lack of attainable housing. Office-to-residential conversions can be a viable solution to both problems: It’s a way to add new value to office space that would otherwise go into default, and it adds badly needed residential real estate in neighborhoods where land is scarce.

Recognizing New York’s housing shortage and its empty office inventory, Vanbarton Group engaged Gensler to convert an aging downtown office building into a premier residential building. The 588-unit building includes a mix of studios and one- and two-bedroom market-rate apartments with robust amenities such as a gym, coworking space, lounges, and a bowling alley. We also added five new floors atop the existing 24-story tower, while retrofitting the building’s existing curtain wall and installing additional insulation and double-pane, operable windows for better performance.

The Pearl House conversion has created 588 apartments and nearly 40,000 square feet of amenity spaces in the heart of the city — activating the ground floor to add more amenities for the new residents and vibrancy to the neighborhood. By reusing the existing structure, we saved an estimated 20,000 metric tons of embodied carbon in comparison to constructing a new ground-up building using conventional concrete construction. The building envelope now exceeds local 2030 energy performance requirements.