A Trippy-Looking Place for Making Your Life Better Through Ketamine

Randy Polumbo made parts of the Cardea offices out of mycelium.

- By Wendy Goodman. Photographs by Sean Davidson

The Mothership

The silver material covering the seating in this room is “that same fireproof fabric that is actually for glass and bronze foundries, and there is something cool about it,” says designer Randy Polumbo. “Maybe it’s the metal that is grounding for humans. It’s energizing.”

When artist and builder Randy Polumbo heard about the three-year-old “healing, recovery, and awakening” organization Cardea, which his friend Dimitri Mugianis founded, he wanted to help. Polumbo joined as a partner, pitching in on the new location on Canal Street, where Cardea’s team would hold sessions with clients involving the use of the drug ketamine. “I worked on things from negotiating the lease and picking space to the final build-out and furnishing the space, all with vintage items from my personal collection and other partners’ libraries of cool stuff, books, records,” he says. “And, of course, mushrooms.”

Polumbo thought it natural to work with reishi-mushroom mycelium to create special pieces for the décor. It’s a material he was already familiar with. Regarding the tables, light fixtures, and some of the window shutters, he says, “It’s all mycelium”: mushroom spores grown in molds, populated with hemp straw or sawdust and with flour for food, that become a Styrofoam-like or corklike material. “My studio turned into a mushroom lab, if you saw it now,” he adds.