That Jennifer Johanson and Patrick O’Hare—now life and business partners—wound up in the same design office in the same small California town may seem like kismet. But that pairing, and the heart of its success, is grounded in the fact that both trained as architects and each bring a programming-based approach to crafting interiors. Some 15 years after O’Hare landed at the Marin County headquarters of EDG (now located in a former hangar on a historic airfield), where Johanson was already CEO and president, the duo oversees a multi-office operation that employs about 75 people and offers a complete suite of hospitality design services.
A native Texan, Johanson received a bachelor’s in architecture from the University of Texas at Austin, went on to do high-rise design in Dallas, then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and landed at John Powers Associates before finding her home at the eponymous restaurant design firm of Eric Engstrom in 1989. She’s never left. “It all started with a road trip to California after being laid off three times in one year during the Texas economic crisis [in the mid ’80s],” she says.
O’Hare, in contrast, was born in San Francisco before moving around the world thanks to his father’s job at a large construction firm—17 places by the time he graduated high school in London (he even “ran 10K races around the pyramids against Egyptians in bare feet,” he says). He studied journalism as an undergraduate, which he says instilled in him the love of storytelling that shows up in his work today, before pursuing an advanced architecture degree. O’Hare returned to the Bay Area in the late ’90s, specializing in retail design for clients including Gap. “When I learned about Engstrom, the idea of restaurant design seemed like a fresh challenge,” he says.
The firm changed its name to EDG around the time Engstrom retired in 2007; he passed away in 2013. In addition to Johanson and O’Hare, who acts as vice president of development, two other partners, CFO David Barth and Michael Goodman, a former executive chef who heads the Singapore office, steer the operation. In the last five or so years, EDG’s projects have moved seamlessly beyond restaurants. “We often found ourselves designing restaurants in the hotel milieu,” says O’Hare, “and more and more people started asking, ‘Why don’t you do the lobby, too?’” Branding has become a natural outgrowth, as well, adds Johanson. “The programmatic thinking and strong narrative that comes with restaurant concepts helped us realize we were unwittingly doing branding, so we’ve formalized that and offer it as a separate service,” she says.
This spring, for example, the firm, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary, provided everything from a marketing plan to uniforms and graphics to the staging of a celebrity-studded launch party for Martyn Lawrence Bullard’s renovation of Santa Barbara’s Hotel Californian. More typically, recent design projects have ranged from the independent Headlands Coastal Lodge & Spa, a relaxed 33-key property on the Oregon coast that mixes Pendleton blankets with storage for surfboards, to the 130-room Lido House in Newport Beach, California, which borrows a New England nautical aesthetic from its East Coast namesake destination, to the conversion of a 400-room Marriott into the Westdrift Manhattan Beach, an Autograph Collection hotel. “We laugh that we’re going to be experts in coastal design,” Johanson says.
As the two move forward—“me at 90 miles per hour without a map, him with a map and stopping to make sure everything’s on track a couple of times during the ride,” says Johanson—they’re thinking about the next 30 years of EDG. “We’ll be announcing some new leaders coming up through the ranks,” O’Hare promises. “It’s an exciting time for us to cement the idea of what it is we aspire to.”
