Crafting a Series of Concrete Elements for Surfing Lifestyle Brand, Saturdays NYC's Flagship Store

Established in 2009 by friends Colin Tunstall, Morgan Collett, and Josh Rosen,Saturdays NYC is a New York-based clothing and lifestyle brand selling both men’s and women’s clothing. Stocked in boutiques and online retailers around the world, the brand has its own flagship stores in Japan and Australia as well as a Crosby St. location in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City which happens to be both a store AND a cafe. 

When firm, Nicon Builds reached out to us to complete work for this location, we were really excited to be a part of such a cool project for a downtown NYC mainstay like the Saturday’s NYC store. For this location, they wanted us to create these giant concrete blocks for the bars and they wanted their surface styling to remain consistent throughout the space including on the floors, benches, clothes stands and on the countertops.

The most impressive & and challenging parts of the project were the 2 massive cast-in-place counters we had to create. Each was cast with three waterfall sides and one of them was almost 20’ long! The bigger of the two, which was going to be used for the coffee bar area, had an intricate, recessed area for the servers, while the cash wrap also had three waterfall sides. 

In order to keep the surfaces consistent, we hand-troweled the floor to match the counter giving off the appearance as though the entire rear of the space was one monolithic concrete surface.

At first, the architects at Derek Ziemer didn’t expect us to be able to complete these counters in a single pour. Much to their surprise, they were excited to learn that we were able to incorporate different countertop heights into a single bar while only having to undergo the pouring process once. Because there are a lot of concrete bars being created in Australia, where Saturdays has a few of its other store locations, they were most happy that we were able to provide a similar look for this location as well.

Looking back on the project, it was really cool to work on so many surfaces and be able to implement several different types of architectural elements into a single space. These are the types of projects that we actively look for as they allow us to showcase the range of possibilities when using the concrete medium!