Dan Wood and Amale Andraos, founders of the five-year-old WORK Architecture Company, are a husband-and-wife team forged in design paradise. Andraos, 34, who hails from Beirut, was studying with Rem Koolhaas at Harvard, and Wood, 40, who's from Rhode Island ("It's a little exotic! It's the biggest little state!"), was a partner at OMA when Koolhaas played matchmaker. After a three-year stint working together in Rotterdam, the pair decided to marry and move back to New York to start their own enterprise. "We have very different strengths; we kind of balance each other, but then at some point the strengths switch," Wood says. "It's more of a conversation back and forth," Andraos adds, proving the point. "One of us starts and the other picks up."

This meticulous chemistry is applied to a huge range of projects: competition entries, including a surrealist reconstruction of downtown Beirut; a stylish building overhaul in lower Manhattan for Diane von Furstenberg's flagship store and headquarters; a radical eco-urbanism course at Princeton. Currently, the two are remodeling a 6,000-square-foot loft in Tribeca for fashion designer Lela Rose and husband Brandon Jones, their two small children, and a terrier named Stitch. The team installed a dog elevator (the Stitch-o-vator), which also serves as a dumbwaiter, and movable tables in each room of the railroad-style main floor that can be placed flush together to make a runway for Rosen's collections. (The table in the game room is also a giant Scrabble board.) WORKac is among the new wave of younger firms taking a holistic approach to design, and they conceived this lighthearted loft interior with the same ingenuity as a huge civic endeavor — like developing the traffic-island wasteland surrounding the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Andraos and Wood's proposal combines mixed-income housing with such thriving neighborhood cultural institutions as the Theatre for a New Audience, the Mark Morris Dance Group, and UrbanGlass.

The only constant is change for WORKac, as Andraos and Wood prefer to keep their options open: "It's really about learning, always cross-pollinating," Andraos says, "and if you specialize, you don't have that exchange." But when that exchange leads to disagreement — especially since the pair is able to "flip from work to life seamlessly," as she puts it — how do they resolve problems and prevent them from coming home? Wood answers with a nod to the company name: "We'll always work it out."