Inside Decoded's New NYC Offices Overlooking the East River

Decoded NY’s panoramic new home is our fifth in as many years, a testament to our rapid growth, evolving structure and ability to break long-term leases. 

Each of our spaces has represented who we were at the time—from our founder’s living room (startup) to a borrowed conference room (promising startup) to what can generously be called a junior one-bedroom high above Penn Station (with our own bathroom key!), followed by a renovated Financial District building that we grew out of the day we moved in, but where we incubated the latest stage of our journey: a truly integrated creative, media and e-commerce agency. 

Decoded NY now lives 100 feet above the East River with floor-to-ceiling windows and sunsets framed by all the famous bridges and ferries that we commute by. We gutted half of the 7th floor of 32 Old Slip, an old 1980s-era Goldman Sachs trading floor, where we can only assume the 17-foot ceilings allowed space for the air of superiority to rise. But we’ve kept it wide open, with unobstructed views from every desk, save for the plants scattered throughout that our hero plant lady Lisa keeps shiny, happy and appropriately rotated toward the omnipresent sunshine.

We focused on functional spaces as the primary goal. Every desk has sit-stand ability, and stadium seating allows for fully attended all-agency meetings. We built tons of medium-sized conference rooms, a wall of soundproof phone booths, cork-covered walls and a dedicated production studio with editing suites. There’s soft seating everywhere, but not so soft that you can’t stay awake. However, the majority of the space is, in fact, space—above the clusters of desks, you’ll find close to 10 feet of overhead clearance, more than enough room for our regulation height basketball hoop. And if there’s a surface, there’s an enormous pile of coasters waiting to be put to work—we have an abundance of cold filtered water (sparkling, still or flavored) and a CEO who despises rogue condensation. 

Once you walk through the doors, the space opens up into an L-shaped swath of polished concrete speckled with natural wood accents and punches of our digital color palette—all set against warm, neutral textiles, and greenery at every turn. Each conference room is named after a fictitious company from television or film. Should you need them, the likes of About the Fit, Vandelay Industries, McDowell’s, Hooli and, of course, Prestige Worldwide are available for your next meeting. And the cornerstone of the office is a 20-foot-long community table in the kitchen that has played host to many a baking contest and our weekly themed happy hours.

The whole office is meant to reduce the silos inherent in advertising by putting teams together, making room for collaboration, and serving as a canvas for anyone with an idea to have a place to make it happen. We’ve worked hard to make creative, media, tech and commerce truly one team. A walk through Decoded’s New York office should make you feel like pulling up one of our readily available chairs and getting stuff done. To quote words that have lived on our office walls since Decoded’s inception, everything you see should help you “make good choices.”