CetraRuddy

CetraRuddy is a New York architecture, planning and interior design firm founded in 1987 by John Cetra and Nancy Ruddy. It’s best known for residential towers and adaptive-reuse work in Manhattan, including high-profile conversions of older office buildings into apartments. The firm is architect on SoMA at 25 Water Street, the country’s largest office-to-residential conversion, turning a 1960s Financial District tower into roughly 1,300 homes. CetraRuddy pairs building design with interiors and amenity planning, which suits large residential projects where the lived experience drives leasing. Its portfolio includes condominiums, rentals, cultural and hospitality projects across New York and beyond.

CetraRuddy has practiced from New York since 1987, and it works across three disciplines that reinforce one another: architecture, interior design, and planning. Keeping all three in-house is a deliberate choice rather than a convenience, because it means a building’s exterior, its interiors, and the way its spaces are organized are developed as one continuous effort instead of being parceled out to separate firms that then have to reconcile their work.
That integration matters most on large residential and mixed-use projects, where the lived experience inside a building drives its success at least as much as the form seen from the street. When a single practice shapes the plan, the architecture, and the interiors together, the amenity spaces, the unit layouts, and the circulation between them can be resolved in concert rather than negotiated after the fact, once the walls are effectively fixed. The result is a building where the inside and outside feel like they were meant for each other, because they were.
Planning sits at the front of that sequence, setting how a site is used and how its spaces relate before the architecture gives them form, and it’s the discipline that keeps a large project coherent as it grows in complexity.
The firm’s reach extends across the United States, carrying that combined architecture, interiors, and planning capability well beyond New York to projects wherever they arise. For a developer weighing complex residential or mixed-use work, having a single team fluent in all three sides of the problem removes the seams that otherwise tend to appear between how a building is designed and how it ultimately feels to occupy. Architecture, interior design, and planning under one New York roof, carried to projects across the country, is what lets CetraRuddy treat a large residential building as a single coherent problem rather than three separate commissions stitched together at the end.