"You can find a funky little space for $300,000, but you have to focus on it and make it a job for six months or a year."

The production designer Jan Versweyveld, Mr. van Hove's longtime collaborator, has turned the New York Theater Workshop, already one of this city's most funky and inviting theatrical spaces, into a spectacular one.

Despite or maybe because of its gritty infrastructure - which included an auditorium with 13-foot ceilings and four obstructive columns, a coal heating system and, in some cases, buckets instead of toilets - the funky space quickly became a success.

I Map Head down a tiny alley to find this funky bi-level space that's frequented by Cairo bohemians.

The center, managed with entrepreneurial rigor by Hunter O'Hanian, provides stipends, studios and free accommodations to 20 writers and artists each year, and shows artists' work in a funky raw space in a former lumberyard.

A funky space crowded with mystery mushrooms, tofu and possibly good-for-you but bruised organic fruits and vegetables, with the whole presided over by a sandal-clad proprietor wearing the human equivalent of a burlap bag?

"Those kinds of things are the amenities that people like to show potential hires - that they've got this funky space, with Starbucks coffee and designer teas," Mr. Basque said.

Now they have a large, funky space in the middle in which to study, chat about what they are learning and collaborate on projects.

In contrast to nearly everything about Maccarone except its funky space, there is Reena Spaulings, a two-year-old gallery, (now on winter hiatus) headed by a nonexistent person, that happened largely by accident.

Working with the artist Silvia Kolbowski, Smith-Miller & Hawkinson has transformed Storefront's funky space into a pint-sized parody of a gallery at the Museum of Modern Art.