It’s a ‘Spaceship.’ It’s a ‘Dentist’s Office.’ It’s Their Home.
Ben Ganz and India Ennenga, a newly married product designer and writer, are beginning their next chapter in a Manhattan loft that he has masterfully reimagined as a seamless live-work space.
Over his nine years in New York City, product and graphic designer Ben Ganz has navigated roughly half a dozen apartments. Most were shared with roommates and rarely fully furnished, let alone equipped with reliable appliances or a functioning HVAC system.
Now, in his new SoHo loft, the 34-year-old has achieved a kind of New York nirvana: a home meticulously renovated to his exact specifications as a live-work sanctuary, featuring his own custom-designed furniture and the luxury of central air-conditioning.
“My vision of a home,” he says, “but also what I imagine to be the perfect work environment.”
Located on the sixth floor of a 126-year-old building, the loft is accessible via several flights of stairs or a charming, hand-cranked elevator. What it lacks in conventional modern amenities, it more than compensates for with abundant natural light. Flanked by windows on three sides, the space is amplified by high-gloss, ice-blue floors and matching ceilings. Together, they create a bowling-alley-like sheen that reflects light to a diffused, ethereal effect.
Ganz moved in late last year, just as his personal life and career began to accelerate. In June, he married India Ennenga, 31, a writer, editor, and actress. Soon, he will be widely releasing products poised to make him a household name, including a wood-and-aluminum bed, dresser, and nightstand slated for introduction next year at Design Within Reach.
The couple’s new home has been a half-decade in the making. Ganz purchased the 2,000-square-foot loft in 2020 for about $2.65 million—a pandemic-era discount, he notes—before he and Ennenga began dating. At the time, he was blissfully naive about the sheer effort required to rehabilitate the space, a process that ultimately cost around $500,000.
Collaborating with architectural designers Nile Greenberg and Michael Abel Deng, Ganz set out to create a multidimensional, floor-through space. The trio had previously worked together on a project for Homer, the jewelry line founded by recording artist Frank Ocean.
Raised in Bern, Switzerland, Ganz credits his rigorous Swiss education for informing their shared choice to build with plentiful, highly functional materials. These include aluminum beams and frosted-glass walls that divide spaces while allowing light to permeate. The allover glacier-tone floors are punctuated by flashes of pea-soup green and cornflower blue on the walls and cabinetry, each finished with a lacquer-like sheen.
The resulting aesthetic makes the home glow in cool tones, reminiscent of the set of an early 2000s pop-music video, complete with frosted lip gloss and cyber-age fashion. Ganz, however, has a different interpretation. “It’s like a dentist clinic from the future,” he says, drawn to the aesthetic’s inherent sense of order. “It’s very cold.”
“We joke that it’s a blue spaceship,” Ennenga adds.
Ganz moved to New York three years before purchasing the loft, having earned a master’s degree in graphic design from Yale. Shortly after his arrival, he was named artistic director of *Pin-Up*, the biannual architecture and furniture-design magazine. From there, independent design commissions rapidly multiplied. He founded his own firm in 2021; it now employs three designers in addition to himself, and his portfolio includes projects for major brands like Nike and Prada.
Having already dabbled in furniture, bedding, and storage, Ganz now aspires to apply his distinct sensibility across a full spectrum of everyday products. In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of design luminaries like Michael Graves and Marc Newson—whose slime-green dish rack design proudly sits on the brushed-aluminum countertop in Ganz and Ennenga’s kitchen.
Throughout the day, the apartment is separated from Ganz’s studio by two massive aluminum swivel doors. When closed, they create a firm mental and physical boundary between his professional and personal realms.
“I don’t like to think of it as working from home,” Ganz explains. “I prefer to think of it as my office being just one door away from my apartment.”
In the evenings, the couple convenes in the rear of the apartment to cook and read. Although Ganz had conceptualized the home’s design long before they met, Ennenga has since introduced eclectic elements to soften her husband’s penchant for stark minimalism. She encouraged him to bring Alpine furniture from his grandmother’s Swiss chalet to New York in their suitcases. Even Ennenga admits she was initially “a little unsure of how it would work” in such a bare environment.
Ultimately, the full set of classic, hand-whittled dining chairs and a milking stool proved to be the ideal foil to Ganz’s industrial design, highlighting the organic silhouettes of the handmade pieces. The couple now considers them the apartment’s perfect finishing touch.
“That’s what I love about this space—it’s a growing system,” Ganz reflects. “My life has changed and developed, and so has my practice. I love that here, they can run alongside each other in harmony.”