Holm & Yoshida is a seven-person studio working from a fourth-floor loft in Dumbo. We design residences, civic rooms, and small commercial interiors — slowly, in sketch and section, and almost always in conversation with what was there before.
We work on a small number of projects at any one time — typically three under construction and two on the boards. What follows is a five-project edit from the past four years, chosen for the questions they answered rather than the awards they collected.
A four-storey 1888 brownstone reordered around a single new north-light stair. Burnt-cedar cladding to the rear extension, Brazilian slate hearth, lime-plastered party walls. The original parlour-floor moulding survives, untouched.
A demountable summer pavilion of cross-laminated spruce, sited against the southern lawn. Twelve weight-bearing posts; no foundations. Designed to be disassembled in three days and re-erected on a different shore.
A confectioner from Kyoto, opening their first room outside Japan. Eighteen-foot ash counter, hand-trowelled tataki floor, a single paper lantern by Asano Paper Mill in the rear vitrine.
A single-storey weekend house on a sloped clearing above the river. Board-formed concrete plinth, blackened steel mullions, a long cantilevered roof in unfinished Douglas fir. Heated by a masonry stove at the centre of the plan.
A neighbourhood reading room conceived as a single, top-lit volume with a continuous oak bench at its perimeter. No screens, no fluorescent. Acoustically tuned to the sound of a turning page.
Anders Holm — Co-Principal · Copenhagen / Cooper Union
Naomi Yoshida — Co-Principal · Kyoto / RISD
Holm & Yoshida was founded in 2017, in a borrowed room above a framing shop on Atlantic Avenue. Eight years on, the studio remains deliberately small — seven people, two principals, one project architect per commission — because the work we are interested in cannot be delegated.
We were both raised in cities where craft is taken for granted: Anders in the brick-and-tile vernacular of Copenhagen, Naomi in the timber-and-plaster intelligence of Kyoto. The studio is the place where those two inheritances argue politely with each other and, occasionally, agree. Most of our buildings are quieter than the block they sit on. We think this is a virtue.
Every commission begins with a long site visit and a longer conversation. We draw in pencil on tracing paper before we draw anywhere else. Renderings are produced only when a client requires them — never as a tool of design. We prefer specification sheets, material samples laid out on a long table, and a 1:20 plan pinned to the wall for six months before a single wall is moved.
A building should know how to be quiet in the room. Most of the ones we admire are simply paying attention to the weather, the street, and the people who already live there.
We work principally in three areas. Residential renovation, which is where the practice began and where most of the labour still lives — five-storey row houses in Cobble Hill, lofts in Tribeca, the occasional weekend house north of the city. Small civic and cultural commissions: a library, a pavilion, a single chapel in upstate New York currently on the drawing board. And retail interiors, but only for makers whose products we already use.
We do not pursue speculative residential, branded hospitality, or anything taller than five storeys. We have turned down more work in the last three years than we have accepted. This is not a posture; it is the only way we know how to keep the studio honest.
A partial list, kept in chronological order. The studio does not submit to most awards; the ones below were either invited or nominated by editors and peers.
The Architectural League of New York · Spring 2025
For Maruya, Lower East Side
For Maruya, Lower East Side
For Pavilion at Pier 6, Brooklyn Bridge Park
By Michael Kimmelman, August 2023
Profile, Holm & Yoshida Architects
For The Quiet Library, Park Slope
Studio profile, October 2021
Spanish edition, Walther König Verlag
Three or four times a year, we publish an essay — usually on a question we cannot resolve in the studio. Subscribers receive the essays by post on letterpress card stock.
A short defence of dug-in, earth-bermed houses — the ones that look from the road like a slipped stone. What they teach us about thermal mass, weather, and the difference between privacy and retreat.
ReadOn the difference between a drawing that proposes and a picture that promises. The studio has, in eight years, produced exactly four photoreal renderings — and we regret three of them.
ReadConcrete is the material clients fear most and live with best. A working note on board-form, pigment, sealing, and the strange warmth of a wall that doesn't try to be friendly.
ReadWe typically take on three to four new commissions a year. If you are weighing a renovation, a small civic project, or an interior, write to us. A first reply usually arrives within five working days.