Who We Are

Ground Up Designers LLC is an experimental design studio based in Brooklyn, New York. While most of our projects focus around architecture, we enjoy working with a variety of different mediums and scales, feeling that collaboration with designers from a number of disciplines makes our work more dynamic, vibrant and energetic.

No matter the medium, our work consistently focuses on the idea of "play" and can be best described as quirky, experimental, and conceptual. We create spaces, objects and experiences that are unexpected and cause people to interact with the world in new and surprising ways.

Lana Zellner

Lana is an architectural designer interested in the communicative power of design. Her work explores the stories a product or piece of architecture tells to the public. She has always believed that these stories can be found hidden within the details, leading her into extensive professional experience in facade design and technical envelope detailing. From lighting to furniture, apartments to opera houses, Lana uses texture, materiality, and technical connections to push the linguistic attributes of the built environment.

Kristen Svorka

Kristen is an interior architect interested in the intersection of the physical environment and the digital world via the incorporation of technology into architecture. Her work focuses on the deconstruction of spatial boundaries and the creation of new types of environments affected by and responsive to the user. In addition to architecture, she is interested in creating objects and furniture that elicit pleasure from the user because of their ease of use, intuitiveness, or ability to make people smile. Really great days are those when all three of these things happen.