Bergen County interior design: Hackensack, Teaneck, and beyond

About HH Designers and our work in Bergen County

Bergen is New Jersey’s largest county market — nearly a million residents, a major medical center anchoring Hackensack, the retail corridors of Routes 4 and 17, and some of the most established Jewish communities in the country in Teaneck, Englewood, Bergenfield, and Fair Lawn. Our anchor project here is 17 Mercer, a 65,000-square-foot multifamily interior in downtown Hackensack completed in 2022 — a building that sits squarely inside the county’s biggest construction story, the rebuilding of its urban cores.

The practice we bring to Bergen mirrors the county’s own mix: multifamily and amenity design proven at 17 Mercer, a national healthcare portfolio that matches the county’s hospital-anchored economy, community and institutional work for the towns that need shuls, mikvaos, and schools, and retail and workplace design for the corridors in between. Two of those towns carry dedicated pages — Teaneck and Englewood — because their institutional markets deserve more than a paragraph.

We serve Bergen from our Toms River headquarters, roughly ninety minutes south, the same way we serve 21 states: with a documentation discipline that makes distance irrelevant. Scheduled site visits, 3D renderings that settle decisions before construction, and a complete Spec Book at the end mean a Hackensack project runs as cleanly as one across the street from our studio.

17 Mercer and the Hackensack multifamily wave

17 Mercer is our built argument for Bergen multifamily: 65,000 square feet in downtown Hackensack, completed in 2022, designed in a register of quiet urban luxury — fluted wood, brass, and marble in the common areas, storage disciplined into the architecture, lobbies and lounges that read closer to a boutique hotel than an apartment building. In a leasing market where renters tour five buildings in a weekend, that first ten steps of lobby is not decoration; it is absorption.

Hackensack’s downtown has been rezoned and rebuilt block by block over the past decade, with thousands of units delivered along and around the Main Street corridor — and Fort Lee, Englewood, and the Hudson-facing towns are running parallel plays. For developers, the differentiator has shifted from unit count to experience: lobby design, amenity programming that residents actually use, and unit finish packages that survive turnover. Our multifamily practice covers all three, with completed projects across New Jersey and beyond.

Inside the units, the same discipline holds at a smaller scale. Urban infill units are rarely generous, so the design work is spatial precision: kitchens that cook and host in the same footprint, storage absorbed into millwork so rooms keep their lines, and finish palettes — rich texture, subdued color — that photograph well on a listing and live well through a decade of tenants. Model units and marketing renderings come from the same team, so what leasing shows is what construction delivers.

Healthcare and medical office

Bergen’s economy is hospital-anchored — Hackensack’s medical center campus is among the largest in the state, Englewood carries its own hospital anchor, and the medical office ecosystem around both keeps expanding along Routes 4 and 17. We design medical offices, specialty practices, and outpatient environments with infection-control material standards and patient-flow logic refined across a national healthcare portfolio: dozens of skilled nursing, rehabilitation, and assisted living projects in 21 states.

The county’s demographics point the same direction. Bergen’s suburbs are affluent and aging, and the senior living stock serving them competes on environment as much as care. Operators repositioning older buildings — or building new memory care and assisted living capacity — get a team that has executed those projects at national scale and documents them to a standard local plan review moves through cleanly.

Behavioral health and outpatient specialties belong to the same buildout. As systems push care into neighborhood settings, the interiors that succeed manage stress deliberately — arrival sequences that lower the temperature, waiting rooms with genuine privacy gradients, and materials that meet clinical standards without broadcasting them. Our behavioral health and outpatient clinic work informs every medical interior we document.

Jewish community institutions

Teaneck and Englewood hold some of the largest Modern Orthodox communities in the United States, with Bergenfield, Fair Lawn, and New Milford growing alongside them — and every stage of that growth builds: shuls, day schools, mikvaos, kosher restaurants, and community centers. HH Designers has designed more Chabad houses than any other interior design firm in the world, and the same halachic fluency — mechitzah planning that preserves sightlines and acoustics, mikvah design to construction-level standards, kosher kitchen separation — carries into every institutional commission.

Institutional projects here are governed as much by people as by code: boards, donors, rabbanim, and building committees all hold a stake, and the design process has to carry them along without stalling. We have run that process dozens of times. The Teaneck and Englewood pages, and our synagogue design practice, cover the building types in depth.

Day schools deserve their own note. Bergen’s Jewish day school ecosystem is among the largest in the country, and school interiors carry double duty — durable, code-compliant learning environments that also express an institution’s identity to the parents who sustain it. Our private school design work covers classrooms, batei medrash, gymnasiums and social halls, and the admissions-facing spaces where first impressions get made.

Retail, workplace, and the Fort Lee corridor

Bergen retail is a paradox worth designing for: the Route 4 and 17 corridors around Paramus rank among the highest-grossing retail concentrations in the country, yet the county’s blue laws close retail on Sundays — and a shomer-Shabbos retailer loses Saturday as well, compressing the week to five trading days. Every open hour has to convert harder, which is an interior design problem: sightlines, adjacency, lighting, and a floor plan that moves a customer to decision without feeling engineered. Our retail and luxury retail practices are built on exactly that math.

The county’s downtowns run a different retail economy than the highway corridors. Englewood’s Palisade Avenue, Ridgewood’s village center, and the main streets of Westwood and Tenafly trade on walkability and repeat local custom, where storefronts win on intimacy and identity rather than throughput. Kosher hospitality concepts in particular — cafes, pizza, upscale dining — are expanding with the communities they serve. We designed a kosher dining district from scratch in Long Branch; Bergen’s operators get the same playbook.

At the county’s eastern edge, Fort Lee and the George Washington Bridge corridor hold high-rise residential and a dense professional-office market — law, medical, finance — where suites turn over and reposition constantly. Our corporate interiors team designs those environments to work as hard as their rents demand, from reception sequencing to conference and focus-room ratios.

Working with us in Bergen County

The engagement follows our published process: consultation, discovery, schematic design, 3D renderings and FF&E selection, then a complete Spec Book — drawings, finish schedules, and FF&E documentation your contractor prices and builds from without ambiguity. Renderings do the heavy lifting for boards and investment committees, and scheduled site visits keep construction honest. We run projects this way in 21 states; Bergen is a short drive by comparison. To start, request a proposal with your address and program.

The distance discipline is worth spelling out, because Bergen clients often assume they need a firm across the street. What a project actually needs is decisions made early and documented completely. Renderings resolve the debates that otherwise consume site meetings, the Spec Book answers the questions a contractor would otherwise phone in one at a time, and site visits land at the milestones where physical presence changes outcomes — demolition surprises, finish mockups, punch list. That system is how a firm headquartered in Toms River delivers on schedule in Washington State; Bergen County is a morning drive.