FKA on Channeling the Office of the Future

This week’s DMTV Milkshake guests are Stanley Felderman and Nancy Keatinge of Felderman Keatinge & Associates.

Stanley Felderman and Nancy Keatinge are not just designers but seers — and perhaps no one is better able to intuit what the future of the work space will look like. “People hire us because we’re futurists,” says Keatinge. With the way we work undergoing an unprecedented paradigm shift, Felderman and Keatinge are now laying down tracks the rest of the industry may follow — from how Zoom can (and cannot) replace the “casual collisions” that brought such energy to FKA spaces like the West Coast headquarters for MTV to the evolution of “seamless” post-covid air circulation technology. “We’re designing furniture now that has its own ventilation system — that’s not only an object in space but also defines the space,” Felderman says. “Or room dividers that are art but also provide filtration.”

In this talk, Felderman and Keatinge discuss how Nancy’s training as an actress helps her better dig into her clients’ needs, the best piece of advice Hugh Hefner ever gave Stanley, and the one design problem that still continues to bedevil them: acoustics. “Acoustics can either comfort us or make us uncomfortable, depending on the resonance of the space,” Felderman says. “We’ve made a lot of progress, but I think there’s a lot of room for growth.”

View Nancy and Stanley’s DMTV Milkshake episode above, then check out the rest of the series here.

Diana Ostrom, who has written for Wallpaper, Interior Design, ID, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, is also the author of Faraway Places, a newsletter about travel.

Milkshake, DMTV (Design Milk TV)’s first regular series, shakes up the traditional interview format by asking designers, creatives, educators and industry professionals to select interview questions at random from their favorite bowl or vessel. During their candid discussions, you’ll not only gain a peek into their personal homeware collections, but also valuable insights into their work, life and passions.