For many designers, the opportunity to fully inhabit their own ideas is often limited to the home, a personal environment where concepts can be tested, refined, and lived in directly. IA's new San Francisco studio materialized from a desire to bring that same spirit of experimentation into the workplace, transforming it into a multi-functional design house that reflects the innovation, deep curiosity, and strategic thinking that shape the studio's work.

Organized as an expansive double-height environment where employees, collaborators, clients, and the broader design community can actively engage in the creative process together, the studio reflects both IA's multidisciplinary expertise and San Francisco's layered architectural character while establishing a more visible presence within the city's cultural landscape.

In addition to a much larger footprint, the move from the eighth floor to the ground-level space offered the Bay Area-based team an opportunity to invite clients directly into the creative process. A series of fully mobile and highly adaptable partitions, monitors, and flexible furnishings allows teams to easily transition between internal collaboration, client workshops, and public-facing presentations, while material-rich work zones enable project partners and designers to co-create in real time.

Reflecting the studio's collaborative ethos and the firm's ongoing commitment to sustainability, the design process itself embraced adaptive reuse and collective authorship from IA designers and San Francisco-based creatives. Inherited architectural elements and existing furniture were restored and reupholstered, archival pieces from IA's four-plus-decade history were rediscovered and reintroduced, and estate-sale finds were layered alongside custom furnishings crafted by Bay Area makers.

Upon entry, a welcome lounge overlooking the busy street corner introduces a warm, coffee shop-inspired energy to the ground floor, pairing playful graphic elements with inviting seating that encourages passersby to look in and engage with the studio from the street. A greenhouse-inspired kitchen anchors the studio as a hospitality-driven hub for informal meetings and daily rituals, while adjacent stadium seating and a large dining table serve as gathering spaces for town halls and all-hands meetings. Workstations are organized along the second-floor mezzanine, allowing unobstructed views of the ground floor while providing focused areas for concentrated work.

Inspired by IA's in-house lighting lab in Los Angeles, the San Francisco studio includes a dedicated lighting lab to support hands-on experimentation and technical learning. Here, designers can test fixtures, materials, and color temperatures in real time, reinforcing the studio's role as both a workplace and an evolving creative workshop.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the project became an opportunity for the San Francisco studio to embody the same principles it advocates for clients: flexibility, hospitality, experimentation, and design expressed through physical space. Carefully layered with reused materials, collectible furnishings, and archival elements, the studio fosters an open-ended environment where dialogue and creative exchange can continue to unfold organically.