Classic Meets Savvy in This Entrepreneur's Brooklyn Apartment

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By Dani Fankhauser2014-06-02 18:01:26 UTC

After wearing the Jawbone UP for two months, entrepreneur Luke Sherwin says his quest to find out whether exercise during the day affected sleep at night was inconclusive. Tracking movement was not enough. But as one of the cofounders of Casper, a digitally-savvy mattress company, optimizing sleep is high on his priority list when it comes to trying new connected gadgets.

See also: Peek Inside This Entrepreneur's Zen Home

His team is looking into a sleep tracker released at CES this year that measures heart rate and other variables beyond of movement, as well as outside factors that can be controlled in one's home, such as lighting and temperature.

In his own space, the digital lives alongside what Luke calls an anti-minimalist aesthetic in his Brooklyn apartment. Mashable dropped by Luke's apartment to see how he's becoming more connected, during both waking and sleeping hours.

How did Casper start out?

While we were in the same accelerator, we discussed why there isn't a single mattress co that we care about or that resonates with us. What if we got something to resonate in a similar way that other brands are doing online in typically boring industries such as razorblades?

We came together with the idea, and pitched it after another investor meeting and the investor was like, oh thats a crazy good idea, can you put us in touch with the person doing it, and none of us were doing it, so we talked about it a little bit more and slowly Casper started to come to life.

How would you define your neighborhood, and what appeals to you about your space?

This is technically Prospect Heights, it's on the border of Park Slope. I'm right next to the 7th Avenue Q and B trains, so I can get anywhere in Manhattan in 15 minutes.

It's nice because we're slightly elevated on a hill so if you go on the roof of this building, there's not another high structure looking toward the Statue of Liberty, so you see church steeples interspersed with other buildings across three miles in that direction.

What do you show off first when people come over?

It would be some site or project on Creative Suite on the iMac. I invested in a 27-inch screen iMac, and a lot of it is just for displaying things that I am proud of.

How do you discover new home products, and what features or aesthetics are you looking for?

Uncrate, product reviews on Mashable and on Gizmodo sometimes. Kickstarter is a massive one, but I've been disillusioned lately with the lead times.

Walk us through a typical day.

I wake up at 6:45 a.m. and spend an hour at my computer catching up on emails. I often make lemonade (it's my morning thing). I bike over the manhattan bridge to NoHo about 10% of the time right now, or I just get the B or the Q train to work. Then I'm in and out of NoHo for meetings, and sometimes at our creative agency in DUMBO, until 9:30 at night when I come back home, often for a drink with my roommates on the roof.

How do you describe your personal style, when it comes to your home.

I definitely like to mix early 20th century art that one can buy for very little from sites like liveauctioneers.com. When everyone else is getting contemporary prints I can get the original paintings, so I like to mix that with things like a massive iMac.

Do you see your home getting more connected? What's next for you?

For me, the interesting part of connected is quantified self. You learn things over a very short period of time and then you can wait for another aspect of your life you want to learn about.

There's a lot of cool sleep tracking technology that was released at CES this year so we're testing a bed sleep tracker that measures all kinds of things — like heart rate — that none of these movement oriented apps do.

Topics: brooklyn, Connected Home Show & Tell, Home, Lifestyle, LUMOback