When international architecture firm Snøhetta found its New York City lease was coming up last year, a search kicked off for a new workspace. The firm, which had been located in Manhattan for 21 years, scoured neighborhoods near and far, such as the Brooklyn Navy Yards.  But in the end, the choice was one many such firms had been making recently, according to partner and managing director Elaine Molinar. They wanted a building with character that was conducive to creative work, and found it within a 25,000 square feet space at 55 Washington Street in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, where about 70 workers will move in later this year.  “The space is on the ninth floor, with a large, beautiful skylight, a big, open elevated area, a private terrace, a wonderful quality of light, and some odd geometry on one end,” Molinar says. “They’re the kind of quirks that architects love. It just kind of feels like home.” [Photo: Chris Cooper] Snøhetta became the latest in a long line of more than 150 architecture and design firms, showrooms and studios that now call Dumbo home. An historic warehouse district that’s been redeveloped and restored by development firm Two Trees for the last 40-plus years, Dumbo has become an almost default destination for architecture and design tenants. In the last year, a dozen such architecture and design leases have been signed, with roughly 40 signed in the last two years. Firms such as Post Company, Henry Built,  Brooklyn Studio and architecture powerhouse BIG—which first moved there in 2019—have relocated Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.  In the last three years, there’s been a push by design and architecture firms to co-locate in the neighborhood, says Alyssa Zahler, Managing Director of Commercial Leasing at Two Trees Management Co., one of Dumbo’s dominant property owners, and Snøhetta’s future landlord.  [Photo: Chris Cooper] Dumbo’s transformation Dumbo remains far from a newly rediscovered area. For decades, it’s been a destination of sorts (and subject of gentrification discourse), with its highly Instagrammable bridge view, proximity to Brooklyn’s new waterfront parkland, and restored warehouse buildings. It’s not even necessarily cheaper; Snøhetta will pay more for their new space in Dumbo than they are now, though they will be getting a longer lease and a lower cost per square foot. The area’s residential real estate is some of the city’s most expensive, with the median home listing for $2.3 million, and median rent over $6,000.  But the continued and even renewed popularity within the design world speaks to its continued appeal, certain real estate realities, and deliberate real estate strategies by property owners.  Two Trees founder David Walentas has made it a priority to try and attract more creative tenants. Walentas had previously been converting property in SoHo for artists. He first came across Dumbo in 1979, after driving over to Dumbo in a red Mercedes convertible to scout out the mostly empty post-industrial collection of abandoned buildings. He saw potential for a similar transformation and purchased a number of buildings in 1981.  Jared Della Valle, CEO and Founder of Alloy Development, who has lived in Dumbo since 1998 (there were wild dogs in the neighborhood at the time), says it’s always been a neighborhood that attracted the arts. Preserving lofts and warehouses here have maintained desirable spaces for creative firms.  “It’s not like there’s any special infrastructure for architects here,” says Della Valle. “I think it’s the  size of the spaces that Two Trees have marketed that have been compelling for the architectural industry.” Two Trees remains the most dominant landlord in the neighborhood, with three properties 45 Main Street, 55 Washington Street and 20 Jay Street. The firm has always prioritized creative class clients, says Zahler, and saw a mini-boom of tech tenants in the early 2000s. Part of that was preservation and conversions of the original building stock, keeping the original building intact and leaving interiors more raw, to give tenants the opportunities to make it their own. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who wrote a book on the neighborhood, said of Dumbo that “the combination of raw materials, so to speak, and a developer with Walentas’s sensitivity might just be a once-in-a-lifetime combination.”  [Photo: courtesy of Two Trees Management] A certain vibe When the Norwegian firm Snøhetta expanded to New York City in 2004, it was working on the World Trade center site, and financial incentives to locate in Lower Manhattan made the choice of office location an easy one. The firm initially worked out of the Cunard Building in the Financial District, in a mezzanine office that looked down into the great hall, a former cruise line boarding area lined with preserved murals. About a decade ago, they moved nearby to Pine Street, a 1961 tower designed by architect Emory Roth Jr. The f