Raised between southern California and Chicago, the San Juan Capistrano Library by renowned architect Michael Graves first inspired Daniel Pierce to pursue a career in architecture. It’s a space he has returned to time and again in his adult life with his sisters, nieces, and daughter. “Watching them interact with the building showed me that its design is still very much relevant in how we live our lives,” he says. It’s an idea that drives his own work today.
He started his career in Mexico City alongside architect Francisco Hanhausen, where working in a foreign culture and learning a second language helped him “understand how design decisions are made,” he says, as well as “how much psychology is involved in what we do.” Grondin, meanwhile, grew up in China, upstate New York, and Boston before graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, majoring in both business administration and economics. She spent the first few years out of college at a financial marketing startup until, inspired by her architect and artist friends, she took a risk and pursued an interior design degree at the Illinois Institute of Art. For her, the allure of the field is its ability to permeate “absolutely everything, especially everything having to do with humans,” she says.
That natural curiosity led Pierce and Grondin, who first met during their tenure at the Chicago-based Gettys Group, to launch Curioso nearly five years ago (the whole process happened in a week after meeting for coffee to discuss partnering on a project), centered on their shared passion “to make life better through design,” says Pierce. Indeed, their experience-driven projects do just that. Hotel Indigo El Paso Downtown in Texas blends Mexican and American culture through a midcentury-meets-contemporary aesthetic, while the charming Harbor Grand Hotel in New Buffalo, Michigan is a lesson in residential influence. Along with the boutique Wheelhouse hotel in Chicago and the second outpost of the social club-hostel-hotel hybrid FieldHouse Jones in Nashville—all from owner Bedderman Lodging—three Mexican hotels are on the boards, which will reflect “the diversity, depth of culture, and genuine hospitality of the country,” says Pierce. As a result, they opened a second office in Merida, Mexico, with the firm now boasting 25 people between its two locations.
To create transformative environments, Curioso is paving the way with “spaces that are meaningful to the people who experience them,” says Grondin. Take their foray into cannabis dispensaries with Seven Point in Oak Park, Illinois, stemming from a “strong belief that hospitality extends beyond hotels, restaurants, and bars,” she adds. “We thrive on taking on new design challenges, especially those presented by a new industry, delivered through the lens of human-centered hospitality.”
