PRACtICE

Strada Design Studio LLC is a practice grounded in making—where modern design sensibility, craftsmanship, and historic preservation are understood as a single, continuous act. Founded by Robert Strada, the firm brings together decades of work across furniture, interiors, architecture, and cultural stewardship, with a particular focus on the historic landscape of the East End of Long Island.

Robert Strada’s career began in 1974 with the opening of his first studio in Broadway Alley in Manhattan. From the outset, his work moved fluidly between furniture, interiors, and architectural environments, shaped by a belief that design is inseparable from material, proportion, and use. This approach was profoundly influenced by his years working in Italy, including a formative collaboration with master cabinetmaker Pierluigi Ghianda outside Milan, where precision, restraint, and material integrity were treated as ethical commitments rather than stylistic choices.

Throughout the 1990s, Strada’s work expanded internationally. He was commissioned to design and install Brioni’s global network of retail stores, working across major fashion capitals while maintaining a disciplined architectural language. At the same time, his own furniture designs were produced by Cassina in Italy, reinforcing a practice rooted equally in craft and conceptual clarity.

A pivotal shift occurred in 2000, when Princeton University invited Strada to restore the 1935 Garden Theater. The project marked a turning point—revealing historic preservation not as nostalgia, but as a living design problem requiring judgment, research, and restraint. This work led to the Princeton lecture series The Artist as a Working Man, and to a deepening focus on restoration, adaptive reuse, and architectural conversion.

Strada’s subsequent work on the East End of Long Island grew from this perspective. Early projects included the careful deconstruction and cataloging of some of the region’s earliest structures, experiences that shaped a preservation philosophy attentive to both cultural meaning and physical fabric. In 2011, Strada Design/Build was established to unite this preservation work with the firm’s longstanding design practice.

The firm’s commitment to cultural stewardship has been affirmed through collaborations with leading institutions, including the American Academy of Arts & Letters, where Strada worked alongside Harry Cobb of Pei, Cobb & Partners and architect James Czaika on the deconstruction and reconstruction of composer Charles Ives’s studio within the Academy’s McKim, Mead & White building.

Today, Strada Design Studio LLC is entrusted with restoring and reimagining some of the East End’s most significant historic structures, including the Blacksmith Shop and Captain Isaac Sayre Barn at the Southampton Historical Museum, the mule barn on Gardiner’s Island, and the Smith–Taylor Cabin on Shelter Island. Larger hospitality projects such as the Topping Rose Inn and Barn in Bridgehampton and the Canoe Place Inn and Cottages in Hampton Bays reflect the firm’s ability to preserve history while creating spaces that remain vital, inhabited, and relevant.

At every scale, the work is guided by a belief that preservation is not the act of freezing time, but of carrying it forward—through judgment, craft, and a respect for what has already endured.