Boston, Massachusetts, USA

The post pandemic work experience has not only created new ways of working, but also the need to reimagine how workspaces bridge “work from home” experiences into a new office environment. We believe offices can create comfortable and productive spaces for the lives of their employees. Our client has risen above, asking us to the avoid the trend that promotes impersonal work spaces with multiple users and less space between them, but rather dedicated work spaces that are comfortably residential, amplifying productivity lessons learned from similar “work from home” experiences.

The 38 Newbury 7th Floor Interiors received an 2025 International Architecture Honourable Mention from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design.

Built in 1920, the eight story Boston Back Bay building construction implemented innovative early 20th century cast in place construction techniques that were concealed by traditional plaster and lathe flat ceilings. Since our clients are real estate developers, their love of Boston architecture is prominent and telling stories about our history, as well as advancing modernism, is a balance that we took on in our design process.

Layered acoustic ceilings, with strategically located openings, reveal the existing concrete construction techniques dedicated to each space and use. In order to achieve acoustic performance while also celebrating the hard concrete vaults, we mitigated reverberation through a continuous fabric stretched absorptive ceiling plane with openings to the concrete ceilings above. In addition, double glazed wall systems installed between offices and conference rooms promote visual connectivity, while also strengthening acoustic privacy. Select openings not only create social connections between staff, but also align to significant adjacent urban context vibrant to Newbury Street.

The overall composition is an arrangement of surfaces, materials and furnishings that delicately balance spatial transparencies and acoustic separation, in order to create an office environment that tells Boston history while also bridging “work from home experiences” into a new office environment.

Architects: Touloukian Touloukian Inc.
Design Team: Theodore Touloukian, Kate Ford, and Molly Bennett
General Contractor: Charles Kacoyanis
Client: Broder Properties, LLC.
Photographers: Anton Grassl. Anton Grassl Photography