When she entered her first year at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Brittney Hart was set on becoming a doctor. “I grew up in a household that wasn’t very encouraging of exploring the arts as a profession,” she explains, but a design course during her second year changed everything, and there was no looking back.
It was her aunt Celeste—owner of her own design and architecture practice in Annapolis, Maryland—who became “an important mentor to me,” Hart says, taking on the young designer after she graduated and teaching her how to find work-life balance. Soon after, Hart moved to Los Angeles and received her master’s in architecture from UCLA. Things moved quickly after that: a job with experimental practice Greg Lynn Form, followed by a cross-country move to New York, where she cut her teeth with SHoP Architects and Peter Marino Architect.
Hart thrives on speed, and “moving through things quickly while checking things off a very considered, ever-present list.” On that list and what became inevitable was launching Brooklyn, New York-based architecture practice Husband Wife with her partner and fellow designer Justin Capuco in 2012. The early days of working together were both a dream—an opportunity to “blend our aesthetics into a practice rooted in balance and duality,” she explains—and a challenge. Capuco was still working fulltime, while Hart took on a lot of the responsibilities of running a new business. “I knew how to design,” she notes, “but I knew nothing about business.”
Their big break came in 2015 when Roll & Hill tasked them with developing a space at Salone del Mobile in Milan, a fruitful pairing that led to designing the luxury lighting company’s first showroom, a three-story space in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. A year later, WeWork came calling with Hart taking on the role of head of interior design and Capuco acting as global creative director. During their tenure (they parted ways with the company earlier this year), they helped grow the design studio from 18 to 130 employees and oversaw 210 projects, defining the coworking pioneer’s aesthetic and its new wellness club Rise by We along the way.
With projects for a large health food group and a boutique jewelry designer on the boards, Hart still looks for that sweet spot “where we both agree on a design approach and feel confident that we have a holistic project,” she says, noting that success is “having a smile on your face before you get out of bed because you’re that excited to do it all over again.”
