It was opening day at the new Bank of America branch on the corner of Houston and Bowery, but there were no balloons, no bunting, and no vinyl signs; no card table with free stickers and hand sanitizer, and no tellers up front behind a grill. The view from the sidewalk showed communal seating in tones of gray and red. Signage outside was minimal — nothing on the façade to announce the newest location of America’s second-largest bank but faint-white sans serif spelling out “BANK OF AMERICA.”
Instead of borrowing the staid architecture of stony churches, the columned grandeur of Roman temples, or the glassy minimalism of the corporate boardroom, this genre of bank is trying for something between a WeWork and a Delta Sky Club, or a Gladstone Gallery or Rachel Comey store where the vibes are slightly off. The actual business of banking is mostly out of sight — with tellers hidden above or behind lobbies and co-working spaces on the other side of coffee bars. Williamsburg has Santander Bank’s “Work Café,” where remote project managers can order lattes and use free Wi-Fi next to a textured wall where faux-vintage letters spell out “Brooklyn.” A Joe Coffee Company on Union Square West has a side entrance to a neighboring Chase branch, as if hiding a speakeasy. The Capital One Café at 14th and Broadway sells Santa Cruz–based Verve coffee for 50 percent off to cardholders, and there’s free Wi-Fi for anyone looking to work from the private banquettes with views of the park. This is all a nice way to recycle real estate at a moment when most people are banking online. It’s also a stab at neighborhood relevance. In September, a New School student marveled that the Union Square Capital One Café felt “more like a home — or at least a really nice furniture store … Do not be dissuaded by the word ‘bank.’”
Which is perhaps the point of the whole exercise. Banks are, well …
Bank of America recently paid a settlement for opening accounts that customers didn’t sign up for and double-charging for bizarre fees — including the punishment for “insufficient funds.” A Joe Coffee outpost may not be enough to overshadow accusations that JPMorgan Chase helped hide transactions that could have exposed Jeffrey Epstein as a sex trafficker, but could it hurt? And Capital One was accused in January of brazenly stiffing its customers of $2 billion by paying .3 percent interest on accounts that it labeled as “high-yield savings accounts,” even as the national interest rate reached 5 percent.
Enter Rebekah Sigfrids, who six years ago was called in to lead design at Bank of America from a career in branded retail for Sephora and Victoria Secret. Sigfrids sees her mission as thinking about branches “as a branded space,” she says. So is she trying to make banks cool? “I mean, Bank of America is pretty cool,” she says on our Zoom, as one of its corporate communications executives listens in. “It’s a pretty cool bank.” She’s just there to make it “a little bit more approachable.” In December 2021, she opened a new branch on Berry Street in Williamsburg, a high-traffic spot across from a Blue Bottle that had previously been a sculptor’s studio. The team put in plain concrete floors, painted a beamed ceiling white, and brought in lots of plants. Art on display includes the metal gate that once hung outside, covered in graffiti — the kind of touch that Sigfrids calls “localizing.” “We really want to be part of the neighborhoods we’re in,” she explains. At the Bowery branch, that included custom wall art that apes the pattern of layers of ripped posters — the vernacular collage you’d see spackled to construction fencing on the block.
Ashley Wilkins, a creative director who worked with Capital One on its chain of co-working cafés, wanted the spaces to feel like a “joyful place to go.” At her first location in Manhattan, at Lexington and 59th Street, her team created a coffee shop with a palette of blonde-wood, blush-pink terrazzo floors, tomato-red accent lights, and a teal-gray coffee counter — softer interpretations of Capital One’s blue-and-red logo. Wilkins leads a studio known for hotels and restaurants and tried to design a prototype for a New York Capital One Café that would feel like a hospitality space for people waiting on line to get replacement checks, order a new card, or ask about travel points. Wilkins’s team lowered the height of the coffee counter, put tellers behind desks designed to feel like kitchen islands, and looked to the sleek utility of Charlotte Perriand and the earthiness of Aesop stores. “I thought of it less as quote-unquote ‘cool’ space and more as this comforting welcoming space where you don’t feel intimidated or threatened,” she tells me.
The Wilkins aesthetic is now being deployed by Capital One’s in-house design team, which renovated its Union Square space to match. The location reopened in May of last year: ATMs are walled in by vertical stripes of handmade blue subway tile and lit by bulbous, ’60s-style lights. Inside, a seating area by the front window can be rented by nonprofits and community groups, a coffee shop by the back wall sells avocado toast and strawberry smoothies, and there’s more space to work upstairs than at a Barnes and Noble. On the Monday morning I visited, a 25-year-old in medical-device sales named Elizabeth was sending emails at one of the wooden tables. She lives in Williamsburg and works remote but was in Union Square because of an appointment that morning. “This kind of just looked like a co-working space to me,” she said. And unlike some of the coffee shops she avoided, it wasn’t blaring music, and people weren’t having loud conversations. So she ordered an iced almond matcha ($9 without a Capital One card) and settled in. “It’s like one-third bank, one-third WeWork, one-third coffee shop,” she observed. “I kind of wish my bank did this.”
