Sweet Industry: One Girl Cookies, Dumbo

Dawn Casale first started One Girl Cookies in Cobble Hill in 2005, when high-end delicacies were a rarity in most Brooklyn neighborhoods. In 2012 she opened a new shop in Dumbo. Situated on the ground floor of a 1914 factory building, the space offered completely different aesthetic opportunities. The challenge was to embrace the new location while also adapting to it the idea of the original One Girl Cookies and its recognizable design elements.

The building is one of eleven factories on the Brooklyn waterfront erected by the inventor of corrugated cardboard, Robert Gair, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. (This small empire was nicknamed “Gairville,” and Gair himself was called “Governor.”) Encountering the exterior, one senses the vast manufacturing spaces that once were within: the two-story arched windows, the thick concrete walls.

One Girl Cookies offers a refreshing counter to this industrial boldness, while keeping the original aesthetic in place, albeit scrubbed clean. Almost all of the artisans Casale hired to build out the Dumbo shop are Brooklyn-based. Oliver Freundlich, formerly of MADE, designed the interior and brass lighting fixtures. He mixed baby-blue-leather counter stools—which echo the coloring of the first shop—and vintage wood display cases into a double-height expanse of poured concrete. 

Casale commissioned Jeremy Seigle, a furniture designer and carpenter who also builds townhouse gardens and custom outdoor furnishings, to repurpose a vintage coffee display case from Sahadi’s on Atlantic Avenue. It fits perfectly against one of the shop’s giant concrete columns. Seigle raised the case on a custom-made table to give it height, while selecting salvaged wood that matched in species and staining it to fit the original.

On the back wall of the shop, a custom mural by Aaron Meshon depicting a fanciful Dumbo as dessert-land integrates the color palette as well as old-fashioned photographs found in the One Girl Cookies look.

One Girl Cookies, 33 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201, 347-338-1268

Post by Anne Hellman