Growing up in San Francisco in a century-old Victorian that was in a perpetual state of renovation fostered a lifelong fascination with design and architecture for Rachael Harvey. After graduating from the architecture program at the California College of the Arts, she eventually found herself at Airbnb. As principal designer focused on workplace design, she “created environments that built up a muscle for translating a brand into 4D experiences,” she says. Harvey recently left the homesharing startup after six years to launch the Original Reality Group with her husband Aaron Taylor Harvey and Leila Khosrovi. The creative consultancy is working on speculative projects like Arroyo Secco that explore the intersection of hospitality and workplace. The year-round retreat would host corporate groups for monthlong stays as a way to leverage remote work without abandoning physical space. “Think of us as an extended team of architectural thinkers, interior designers, and changemakers,” she says.
Early design memories
Harvey’s first exposure to design was watching her father sketch CD-ROM burners and cell phones while hearing her mother talk of proposals and pitches. “Design is the family business, so like legions of doctors and lawyers before me, I followed in my parents’ footsteps,” she says. “Most of my early encounters with spaces have to do with what it felt like to be in unexpected spaces or running through an office after hours in my socks and being struck by how the space changed due to who was there, what time it was, and what the rules were.”
Stairwells double as workspaces at Airbnb’s Singapore office
Finding inspiration
Harvey says she finds inspiration in the “quiet moments when I become aware of looking through a window and seeing something beautiful and flashes of great memories—candlelit dinners with friends, wine, discovering something new and exciting.” She is driven to create those experiences for others. “That can be dressing up space to draw people in, or enticing people to behave differently when they’ve arrived,” she says.
Influential moments
Among her main artistic influences, she lists Konstantin Grcic, John Portman, and most notably, Frank Lloyd Wright, citing his Marin County Civic Center building in California as a favorite. “The style is Willy Wonka-meets-space station in the Deco tradition,” she says. “There are moments that are almost too good, like a sculpture garden tucked at the end of a wing or the shotcrete dome that caps the library’s reading room.” Harvey’s dream, on a similarly grand scale, is to design a fashion or food museum. “There would be so many opportunities to make a statement and a lot to think about in terms of how people move through space.”
The Townsend Atrium at Airbnb’s San Francisco office reflects its people-centric ethos
The London office, with creative direction by Airbnb and architecture by Threefold
Photos by Beton Brut, Aaron Taylor Harvey, Mariko Reed, Donal Murphy, and courtesy of Airbnb
This article originally appeared in HD’s July 2020 issue.
