Staten Island interior design: built work in the borough, backed by a national firm

About HH Designers and our work in Staten Island

Staten Island occupies an unusual position in New York construction: a borough governed by New York City codes and Department of Buildings filings, but with a building culture closer to suburban New Jersey’s — owner-driven, relationship-based, and impatient with firms that arrive carrying Manhattan overhead. HH Designers fits that market naturally. We are a national interior design firm headquartered in Toms River, New Jersey, roughly an hour down the Garden State Parkway from the Outerbridge Crossing, with completed work in 21 states, more than 60 million square feet designed, and $2 billion in construction documentation behind our drawings. Staten Island is not a market we serve from a distance. It is one we can reach before a morning site meeting starts.

Our built proof in the borough is 124 Central Ave, a 200,000-square-foot project completed in 2018. Work at that scale is where interior design stops being decoration and becomes infrastructure: corridor logic that has to stay legible across long floor plates, finish systems selected to survive decades of turnover, amenity and common-area programming that earns its square footage, and documentation a New York general contractor can price without guesswork. That project taught us how the borough builds — and it anchors everything else on this page.

Around that anchor sits the rest of our practice: healthcare and senior living for operators whose portfolios span the New York metro, community and religious institutions for the Island’s growing Orthodox Jewish population, retail along the borough’s commercial corridors, and multifamily work shaped by the same forces redeveloping the North Shore. Every engagement runs through the same process and ends with the same deliverable — a complete Spec Book of drawings, finish schedules, and FF&E documentation.

What 124 Central Ave taught us about building in the borough

Two hundred thousand square feet in Staten Island is a different assignment than the same square footage in Manhattan or in a New Jersey township, and the differences are practical. DOB filings and inspections run on New York City’s terms, so our documentation is prepared to be finalized with the architect of record and expediter who carry that process — clean scope boundaries, coordinated reflected ceiling plans, and finish schedules that do not generate objections. Site logistics run on the borough’s terms: bridge access, staging on constrained lots, and trades who price uncertainty harshly. The tighter the documentation, the tighter the bids.

What carried the project was the discipline we bring everywhere: decisions recorded in writing through our client portal, photorealistic renderings approved before procurement, and a specification package complete enough that field questions were answered against the drawings rather than improvised. That is the working method we bring to every Staten Island engagement, whatever the sector.

Healthcare and senior living for a borough that ages in place

Staten Island’s population skews older than the city average and is famously loyal to the borough — residents age in place, and the demand for skilled nursing, rehabilitation, and senior living beds reflects it. Our healthcare studio has delivered skilled nursing, rehab, assisted living, and memory care environments for portfolio operators across the country, and the New York metro is where many of those operators are based. For them the argument is consistency: one survey-tested room and finish standard, one FF&E package that procures at scale, one accountable design partner from Staten Island to wherever the portfolio ends.

New York State Department of Health oversight shapes these buildings well before aesthetics enter the conversation — egress, finishes, clearances, and infection-control logic all sit inside the drawings. We design for the two audiences that decide a facility’s reputation: families forming an impression in the first ninety seconds of a tour, and the staff and surveyors who live with the building’s operational logic every day. Our wider New York healthcare practice is covered on our New York healthcare page.

Community and Jewish institutions

Staten Island’s Orthodox Jewish community has grown steadily, and with growth comes building: shuls expanding, mikvahs upgrading, schools adding classrooms, and community organizations outgrowing borrowed space. This is the deepest part of our national practice. HH Designers has designed more Chabad houses than any other interior design firm in the world, and the fluency transfers directly — synagogue layouts where the mechitza and sightlines are resolved in schematic rather than retrofitted, mikvah construction detailed for halachic supervision, kosher kitchen planning, and social halls engineered to turn over from kiddush to dinner without a facilities crew.

We also know how these projects are actually decided: a rav guarding requirements, a board weighing costs, and donors who need to see the finished room before they fund it. Our renderings are built for exactly that conversation, and our documentation lets a Staten Island contractor execute halachic details correctly the first time.

Retail and neighborhood commercial

The borough’s retail lives on its corridors — Hylan Boulevard, Forest Avenue, New Dorp Lane, Victory Boulevard — where storefronts compete on visibility and repeat neighborhood traffic rather than tourist volume. Our retail practice runs from boutique fit-outs to flagship environments, with documentation that keeps landlord work letters, franchise standards, and DOB filings from colliding. One building type multiplying along these corridors is retail-fronted medical space; our Doral Health & Wellness storefront clinics in Brooklyn, just over the Verrazzano, are precisely that hybrid — consumer-grade finishes on a clinical program — and the model travels.

Multifamily on the North Shore and beyond

The redevelopment of the North Shore — St. George, Stapleton, and the waterfront parcels between them — has brought Staten Island multifamily buildings whose renters compare amenities against Brooklyn and Jersey City, not against the borough’s older stock. That is a competition decided in the lobby, the amenity floor, and the leasing tour. We design lobbies, lounges, fitness rooms, and rooftop clubrooms that photograph well and then survive full occupancy, with FF&E specified for portfolio procurement. Our nearby work in Brooklyn — including the 60,000-square-foot 25 Quincy — sets the standard we bring across the bridge.

From first walkthrough to finished space

Proposal and discovery

Every engagement begins with a conversation about what you are building and a walkthrough of the space — easy to schedule when the designer is an hour away rather than a flight. We document existing conditions, define the program with the people who will operate the building, and return a proposal with scope, schedule, and budget ranges calibrated to New York-area construction costs rather than optimistic averages.

Design development and renderings

Schematic design establishes the plan, the material direction, and the budget logic; photorealistic 3D renderings then let you approve the finished room before a dollar of procurement moves. Every decision runs through our client portal, in writing — a record that protects owner and designer alike when construction starts asking questions.

The Spec Book and construction

Documentation is where our reputation lives: floor plans, elevations, reflected ceiling plans, lighting and finish schedules, and complete FF&E specifications, coordinated with your architect of record for New York City filing. Through construction we answer field questions against the drawings, review submittals, and show up for the milestones that decide quality — including installation, where the last five percent of effort produces the first impression everyone remembers.