A neat little row of bricks and stone blocks sits on a worktable inside the TriBeCa offices of the development firm DDG. Some are classic red, others ivory white; a few resemble smoke, a ghost of their birth in the kiln.

“Each brick has a fingerprint,” said Joe McMillan, chief executive and co-founder of the six-year-old firm.

He was not being poetic, at least not entirely. On the top of each 21-inch brick is a pair of thumbprints, a reminder that each one was pressed from a wooden mold by an actual person in Broager, a small seaside town in Denmark where the bricks have been made in this fashion by the Petersen brick company since 1791.

“The crazy thing is, no one is ever even going to see that print once it’s been set,” Mr. McMillan said. “But just knowing they are there, it gives you a sense of how much care went into each brick.”