AvroKO

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: I’m Stacy Shoemaker Rauen. I’m the editor in chief of Hospitality Design magazine and the senior vice president of the design group at Emerald, our parent company. I’m beyond excited to be sitting here today with the founders of AvroKO. We have Greg Bradshaw, Adam Farmerie, Kristina O’Neal, and William Harris. Thank you so much for being here. For the last, 25 years, AvroKO has created spaces that feel new, inviting, timeless, and layered all at once. As they say on their website, they aim to connect meaning and purpose through innovation and hospitality design. What started out as four has grown to five offices, 150 team members, and projects in 22 countries.

And they don’t just do interior design, they do branding and invest in startups. We’re going to talk about their process, how they got started and where they’re headed. I can’t wait for this conversation. I have been a big fan and friends with them for years, so this is an honor to have you all on the stage. Looking back, is there something you wish you knew then that you know now? Or was ignorance bliss in starting out?

William Harris: I think 25 years as a company, but the story of AvroKO started 10 years before that as friends in university. I mean, we met when we were 17, 18, 19 years old, collaborating in school and running around and just having an amazing time of it.

Adam Farmerie: And when you’re 17, 18, 19, I mean, ignorance is bliss, right? You’re basically collaborating your co-conspirators. You’re reckless and footloose and free. And we became friends, but we also were doing a lot of work together at the time. And I think that laid the foundation for when we came together to actually start the business. We already had 10 years behind us. It’s almost like if you know somebody and your friends and then 10 years later you decide to become romantically involved, it’s going to be a really great relationship. You already kind of know all their foibles, right?

Kristina O’Neal: Yeah, I think it’s just like a four-way marriage for sure. It’s been so many years. I mean you’re thinking 35 years hanging out together, living on the same streets, building a global company. It’s an unimaginable journey. And it’s crazy that we’re sitting here today. I don’t think we had any idea.

WH: We literally grew up together like family. So we say ignorance was completely bliss because I think if you had told us anything, if our future selves were able to talk to our younger selves, for one, we wouldn’t have listened. And we had to learn on our own the hard way and grow together as a group and just kind of craft a journey as well.

Greg Bradshaw:It definitely was not a business plan. There was just kind of a shared passion. And I think that was part of the ignorance is bliss part of it. You just really enjoy that collaboration that you started with and we just wanted to keep seeing that going. It’s not probably a lot of people out there, you go to design school or art school, you don’t get business classes. You just are in it for the work. And so that is really, were the beginning years and they started in school together for sure.

SSR: So tell the story of how you came to finally come together and then the meaning behind the name AvroKO. I don’t think everyone knows that too.

GB: Well, it’s kind of interesting. Adam and I both found ourselves in New York City and we were both working at different architecture firms and a project just came up and we were like, Hey, remember back in university that was really fun. Why don’t we do this project together? So that just ended up with us having a small architecture firm together called Avo Design. And we were just doing office spaces, a little bit of residential work and things like that. And at the same time, William and Kristina were kind of having the exact same experience and they had started a company called Edia Studios and look, there might be meanings behind both of those names. And we came, I don’t know, we sat down, we’re like, okay, what’s the new company going to be? And we threw out just the most ridiculous names. But at the end of the day, we just realized that if we just smooshed the two together, that kind of just worked. And it just became AvroKO.

AF: We had a project that we started doing together. So I think we had a client that was in the beauty industry and they needed some branding and graphics and we’re like, Hey, why don’t you work on this with us? And it was just so much fun. Again, we were like, oh my God, this is what this should feel like all the time. And then when we found ourselves in that situation, we started noodling about what were some of the project types that we could be attacking with all of our kind of combined powers of being able to do interiors and architecture and furniture, but also graphics and strategy and branding and stuff like that. And so we landed on the idea of targeting hospitality projects because those were the kinds of things that needed all of our skill sets.

SSR: What were the early days? One long party.

AF: Yeah, work hard, play hard, right? I mean it was really, they were wild.

WH: It was exhausting and thrilling and magical. There wasn’t a roadmap. So the goal was just to create really amazing things together. And so like Adam said, when projects came along that we could kind of wrap our heads around, we dove in full steam. And so it was just working around the clock and basically living together and becoming our own family.

AF: It was late nights, working weekends. We were in our mid 20s, and so very few of us had meaningful relationships at the time. We were our own individual meaningful relationships. We didn’t have mortgages. So there were times when you don’t pay yourself for the month because the funds are tight, but when you’re your mid twenties, you can afford to do that. You don’t even think about it. You kind of say, ah, whatever. Let’s just kind of make sure that we’re getting the right work and that’s doing the right work. And you have to start with those scratchings and it would be near impossible to do today. Nobody had mortgages.

GB: I think a lot of it as well though, was because there weren’t as many projects it allowed us and we could go out and we could go to the bar or the restaurants together at night. There’s just a lot more questioning. I think that even comes from the university days, you’re really exploring. And so that dialogue that we developed in the early days when not up against the wall with deadlines, it just became a good part of the habits for us to really delve in and have a lot more intellectual discussions about the work. And I think that really led into a lot of what we developed later as we sort of codified our process a little bit more. It was all born out of those early discussions because you just had the time and you were really into it because you just weren’t as much up against those deadlines that we all have to deal with a lot later. It was a sense of freedom.

SSR: I got to interview them the first time. I was a young editor and you won two James Beard awards for design and branding and graphics for Public, your own restaurant, which was unheard of. No one’s ever won both of the awards. So tell us a little bit about Public, what that meant and why you did it and what that meant and how you think that kind of propelled what AvroKO has become.

KO: We didn’t know. It was a very generative process coming together. So we didn’t totally know that there was going to become a system to working together. I think public solidified the system and I think it also allowed us to figure out how to agree, how to build trust, how to operate in a narrative because Greg and Adam were really coming from line form, space architecture and a lot of strength there. William and I were coming from a very art narrative background, and so that chocolate peanut butter mix wasn’t totally defined and so public was the definition there. I think it helped us hone how we would work together for the future.

AF: And also we had this dream when we all came together that we wanted to build a creative company, not an interiors company. So the notion of it was almost like this idea of a modern day Bauhaus when anything could happen and the idea of doing our own project wasn’t antithetical to that. It was kind of like, well, why shouldn’t we do this? And it was also a very meaningful moment in our lives in which we were pushing ourselves even further in terms of that trust that Kristina was talking about where it’s one thing to have to make payroll for six or seven kids in the office. It’s an entirely different thing to go out and raise a couple million dollars mostly from friends and family that you have to be responsible for and you have to find an ROI. So it was not only just designing the restaurant, but it was diving into the operations of the business and making sure that it worked as a business because all of us wanted to make sure we could go home to our families at Thanksgiving and not have to say, I’m sorry, but we lost your money,

WH: And in the beginning when we were just scrapping together and we had this tiny little bar in the East Village or this tiny little F&B joint in the Lower East Side, you’d put all this time and this effort and this love, and we were learning how to work together. We were creating these projects, but then it would get done. You’d see the frenzy of the opening night, and then you would just kind of hand it over and the owners would take it over and the operation staff would run with it and the music would kick on that you didn’t have anything to do with. And we’re like, wait a minute, that’s amazing. But we were just one small part of it. And so I think we really wanted to realize the whole creation and really have that sense of control as well. So not only did it test how to work together on the design front, but it was also like how can we bring a brand alive and how can we surround it with all the things that we love and have ultimate control and give it a go holistically.

AF: It wasn’t just like you set the music and then off to the races. It’s like we hired the staff and we were managing the floor and understanding how to develop marketing programs and how to figure out how to get people to show up at the restaurant again and loyalty and all the little nuances of what it means to be hospitable, truly hospitable to your guests and trying to figure out how to make that work. So it was really great.

GB: I think it also really gave us, we really had to put our money where our mouth was and I think it gave us a lot of empathy for everybody involved in any project. We had to raise the money, we had to find the space. I mean, God, do you remember how long it took us to find the space? Yes, we had, I mean we have these kinds of terms that we’ve developed over the years, but they all sort of started there. We had to think sideways because we were looking for ground floor space and it was too expensive and we found a space that was actually like six steps up and that was cheaper. So we’re like, I think we can make this work, right, let’s go for it. And we made it work by putting in some stairs where there was a window and that was the only way we could make it work because otherwise we couldn’t have afforded that space.

But we then found the contractors, we became the contractors, we found all these other friends, came out of the woodwork. We had friends that were great millwork and we’re like, Hey, we only have so much money, but can you help us here? And putting the whole thing together became a real foundation for us. I think where running it, but also putting the whole thing together I think gave us some sympathies and allow us to work nicely with everybody and collaborate not just with ourselves, but with anybody putting together a project from our clients to investors, to the contractors to the operators themselves.

WH: It was also cheap. There was a murder in it right before we rented it. I remember that was literally, so that’s how we get cheap spaces. It was an off market deal, but we had to literally move our design offices into the restaurant and you’re looking at me like, no, there was a story. We could get into it later afterwards, but there were two spaces that we took after that with another murder. It was a good deal in, if you remember in Napa. But we moved our design offices literally in the back of the house. So we had our design staff commingling, which was only a handful at the time, commingling with the restaurant staff, sitting amongst wine chillers and boxes of ramekins and plates and all that stuff. And we had to, because we’d work all day in the design office, we would have then staff meal for the restaurant staff, but also invited our design staff to join and commingle with our restaurant staff, which was amazing. So both worlds were able to really get to know each other and understand both sides of the aisle as it were. And then we would tend to manage in the evenings and then be there till all hours of the night and then start again the next day at 9:00 AM. So yeah,

SSR: Those were some magical nights at Public restaurant. I don’t know if anyone got to go there on the Lower East Side, but it was great. Then you went on to do other restaurants as well. Talk about that and why you decided to keep opening various restaurants and trying different concepts.

KO: There was living labs, we were able to go in and we said, well, what’s a different model? Public had a particular model, Michelin Star, etc, and that service model. So going in and doing a series of bars, doing other restaurants each time we were testing out, and this was for our client’s sake too, testing things out that might be hard to achieve. They might be difficult on a lot of levels. And then once you’ve got the hang of it, you could translate those ideas into projects. So it’s very rare that you could be in a position to have living labs where you’re working on the floor, you’re seeing it happen, you’re seeing the operational issues, you’re seeing where you might lose money, you’re seeing where people feel insecure in the space and mitigating in a real time. It was just like a luxury to be able to do that.

WH: And that was the best university because we had limited funds. We never raised the full amount that we thought was necessary. That probably was necessary to do it properly, but we were scrappy and were able to pull together with, again, like Greg said, our friends setting up metal shops in one corner and a wood shop in another. But we had to learn where to make impact, where to spend the money, what that impact meant, how people enjoyed the space, what they were experiencing and how the staff were interacting in the space. And again, testing ideas that maybe other clients were a little, had some trepidation to move forward with. So it was our own living lab and university.

AF: We did the first one, Public, and we thought, okay, great, that’s it. We’re just going to go on and go return to becoming just a design firm again. But after that, you just sort of think, get an itch, you kind of like, well, maybe let’s do something else and you don’t even think about it. I mean, at some point we opened, we were counting 19 venues over the course of 15 years, and it’s not like it was a grand plan, it was just kind of like, oh, maybe we should do a wine bar next or maybe we should try this out. And you just get interested in pushing yourself to sort of seek new ideas, new boundaries, really.

GB: I think they really, it allowed us to flex a lot of muscles too. I mean, we have already mentioned it to a certain extent, but you might just really have this idea that you’re not sure if maybe your client is ready for, but we’re sort of ready for it. And so we could really just flex our muscles a lot. I think it taught us a lot of good skills too. Not everything worked. We had to adapt a lot of the time, and so we learned a lot of great skills. I think for business just in general from this, we opened one restaurant the same day that Lehman Brothers collapsed, and that obviously didn’t really set the right economic tone for that restaurant. And it was an awesome restaurant, great design, but we knew that we had to adapt. And so adaptability is something that we learned from the restaurants, so we switched that restaurant into something else that became Saxon + Parole. And so trying to pivot know that you tried something and maybe it didn’t work out so well, but then looking for an opportunity and understanding what the market is at that moment in time and then being able to use what was successful but then tweak, it became things that have just really served us well.

WH: We’re really lucky. It gave us a lot of respect at the tables with our clients too. Like, oh, I’ve done that. I’ve seen that. I’ve felt that pain. This is how we solved it. How might you think about it? Then we worked at the same time, you’re working with so many other great chefs and operators and they’ve been wonderful to share their secrets and their histories with us. So you’re constantly gleaning and then you’re testing those ideas back out in one’s own venue. So it was this great give and take.

SSR: I remember one Ghost Donkey, you guys built that. All the four of you, right? With your team. 

KO: All of the self-propelled [restaurants] up into our most recent one are hands-on. We paint, we do all the standing, we are doing the bars. So it’s good just to be hands-on and in the thick of it and doing it in a new way each time so that the learnings are there firsthand and there’s no distance. And so all of the self-propelled, including Ghost Donkey, are like that.

AF: They’re like little art projects or big bar art projects. They’re sort of like, just get your hands dirty, kind of get stuck into it and see what happens. We’re makers at heart, we can’t help ourselves.

WH: And Ghost Donkey was amazing because it was Madame Geneva before that, if you remember, and we had that for approximately 10 years. And as many of these smaller venues bars, it gets a little long in the tooth after a while and you want to shake things up, and it was a small contained space. So we started slipping things in the cover of late nights when Madame Geneve was still operating and all of a sudden this weird Mexican flower might pop up or these red string lights would start to pop up, but they weren’t turned on. But we ultimately turned around the space in five days, I think a week. We had an amazing team too, so our bar team and other creatives with the food and the beverage. So we were able to create a new concept quickly, and it was a hit. And I think we opened our ninth in Dallas yesterday. So from five days painting walls and getting old flowers, it’s turned into a little bit of a brand for us. It’s been really fun.

SSR: That’s awesome. Alright, so talking about building brand, you started with the four of you, and now you have  150 team members, five offices. I know a lot of it was organic, but how did you grow and start to define what AvroKO was or is?

KO: I think somebody mentioned it, but that we didn’t have much business, so we invented every single system from a creative place. It wasn’t from a place of reading a bunch of business books or anything like that. So one thing that we focused on was to figure out what, at least with the four partners doing an annual summit and talking about the things that we might want to do that would be a desire, a passion, and then also why we might fail. We did both. The personal summit was both angles and I think that those processes lay the groundwork and now we do them with our teams and our leadership and we’re able to sit with them and talk about the same kind of ideas, but it’s so generative. It’s like an organism. It doesn’t happen with 10 year plans. It really happens in an annual basis and it’s based on desire and being very honest and truthful.

I think about what we can and can’t do and that has think it’s incredibly rare to be together for this long, and I think part of that has come from being honest in these annuals where you can say, I hate this. I love this. I’m afraid of this hurt my feelings. I think this is amazing. So it’s pretty broad where we go with it. It’s almost like marriage counseling. That’s what I was saying, our four-way marriage, it’s very deep. So I think that helps if you can parlay that into business, you can make models that are newer models than traditional models, which might’ve been hierarchical. They have a lot of steps to them. They have a lot of rigidity. We just don’t work like that. So I think the growth has come from that organism place.

AF: It’s sort of like what you were saying, you’re taking care of each other, right? Kristina makes these things called magic papers, and we could talk about magic papers for an hour, but it’s basically listening to each other and saying, what’s important to you and how do you see yourself living your life? So for example, the restaurants came out of those magic papers. It was just kind of like, well, this is important. I was saying, oh, it’s important to me. And so everybody rallied around it. And then a couple years later William was saying, well, I think I really want to spend a bit more time in Asia. I think there’s an opportunity for us to spend some time there and actually build a business. I’m willing to do the travel. And so we said, great, that’s important to you. We will support you to do that.

So the office in Bangkok is now 60 people. It was just two people in Hong Kong in a small apartment in 2006 and 20 years later that office has grown. But it wasn’t like, oh, we’re going to have some world domination idea. It was just like, no, I kind of need this for myself. Or Greg was saying, oh, I really need to move to San Francisco. Great, let’s do that. Or I said, Hey, I think it’d be really, I want to spend more time in London. I lived there when I was younger, and it was like everybody sort of rallied around it and said, yes, let’s do that. So the offices weren’t, as Kristina was saying, they were more about taking care of each other and not about growing a business.

WH: We have passions that we build a business around, not the other way around. So it’s interesting,

SSR: Which I think is really rare, right? 

GB: I think different places have held specific allure for us, and I think they tie together quite a bit too. Again, William had this itch of Asia and then that helped bear out a lot more work there. It was started though from a passion, and the West Coast had an allure for me, both project wise, the desire to kind of do more resort work, and there was a lot more of that out there. And then just like the west and the nature and just being a little bit more attuned to that. And so that was an allure for me. And then Europe as the history there and working on projects, we love these projects where you can kind of adapt something historical, and I think that was, it’s an allure for all of us, quite honestly. But I think specifically for Adam, that was quite an allure opening the London office.

AF: At some point, Greg was saying, oh, I really want to be building more of the furniture we’re designing. I love to design furniture, but I also like to tinker and build. So what started out as just literally going to a shop in Brooklyn and physically building a couple pieces of furniture turned into a company in which we were building furniture for 30, 40 percent of our projects. And it all started from this passion that Greg had to actually physically build furniture. And five years later, all of a sudden it was like, oh, that’s actually a company. It was a business there.

KO: I’ll just add one note that not all of the companies succeed. So you can have a passion and say, great, it’s fantastic. We all support you, but you’re supporting through the successes and the failures.

AF: You don’t want to talk about the clothing company.

KO: We have so many so failures. But I think because it’s okay, part of the adventure has been trying things on and supporting each other through the good and the bad, and also supporting our staff when they have a longing that they want to go do is doing our best to support that too. So it’s extended out and it’s not just the partners. I think it it’s in it now in that business model,

SSR: Is this the same way you also have another arm Brand Bureau, which is branding and allows you to do different types of non-hospitality projects. Was that also a passion at the time?

KO: It was something that came up where I wanted to engage with bigger brands that might need strategy and they might need branding, but apart from AvroKO’s agenda. And so we began that as a way to work with different kinds of brands and be more involved on a strategic level. We weren’t doing strategy prior to that. Yeah, and that’s been all in many, many different places, but that was one of my initial, what if, couldn’t we do something amazing?

AF: We all said, sure, let’s see what happens. What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? Right. Worst thing that’s going to happen is you’re going to fail and then you just pick yourself up and do something else.

SSR: But I do think that’s a really good lesson is allowing yourself to fail.

AF: Yeah, not everything’s going to be rainbows and unicorns. You have to make some mistakes.

SSR: So how have you grown as leaders and how have you had to, I know with 150 people, so many offices, how do you divvy up who does what, and so how does that work and how have you grown over the years together?

AF: I think the biggest thing is it takes a village, right? It’s not even just the four of us. I mean, we have incredible leaders in our organization, some of whom are here today who have been with us for 8, 10, 12, 15 years. And so they become, we’ve become collaborators with them and we’ve go arm in arm with them. Kristina mentioned this before. It’s not very hierarchical. It’s more like, oh, we’re all in this together kind of thing. And so the leaders that are in each of the studios sit at the same table. It’s really important for us that everybody has a seat at that table and everybody has a voice, not just in the design process, but in the actual operations of the company. So again, as Kristina was saying, if something’s important to them, then it becomes important to everybody. And our success is everybody’s success.

GB: And the same lessons that we learned working with each other. I think we try to instill and we use the same kinds of collaborative sensibilities with everybody around us, and we get inspiration from our staff and hopefully we provide a lot of inspiration to them as well. And I think that that’s just part of the create as a collaborative mission that we have.

SSR:  I did a podcast with somebody who used to work for you, and she said that it was such a great learning their process, and she said that the way that you guys look at a project is how she’s now instilled in what they do moving forward, which I think speaks volumes for what you all do. But can you talk a little bit about that process of how do you start, how do you look at something and then make it become a reality?

WH: So when we started, it goes way back to how we learned to think and design. When we started in university, there was a program where it was just the whole school was a concept program. So we were in the visual arts program, but it wasn’t about just making a painting or a sculpture or architecture. It was about the concept studio, the idea. So the idea always came first, and then you find out you understand how to break that apart, get to the heart of the idea, and then what design implement tools are going to help support that. So in any project, that’s really important to us, getting to the soul of it, understanding who the clients are, their needs, the deeper narrative that we can pull from that. So we’re incredibly inspired by history, by a sense of place, and we’ve created a series of layered creative process that can tap into different psychological and emotional aspects to bring that to life.

AF: Yeah, I think that’s perfectly said. At the end of the day, we take great pride in the fact that most of our projects don’t have a style per se. They don’t look like some firms have a style, and that’s cool. I think we take great pride in the fact that there’s a thread to the projects that we have that tend to be conceptual and narrative driven, and there’s an attention to detail and there’s a care for the craft of them, but they don’t look like each other.

WH: We try to throw in, we say think sideways, but just to find something completely unexpected, quirky, a muse that just shouldn’t fit. And we also created a do not list. So if we’re creating an Asian concept or a particular typology, we take all the obvious tropes immediately and put it on the do not list and cross them out and communicate that to the team. So we’ve got to be more creative, creative. You’ve got to find something more interesting, something left of center to make this unique.

KO: And it’s something that’s always been really important to us is how people feel in the space. So we have something called hospitable thinking. It’s a human needs model where we’re looking at how people feel. Do they feel significant when they’re experiencing the space? Do they feel safe? Are they surprised and delighted by something that they’re experiencing? And maybe most importantly, are they in some sort of synergy with the space? Are they feeling like they’re part of it? Do they belong? And I think these kinds of ideas, psychological ideas, framed in human needs models are really important to the design process.

SSR: Is there one part of the process that you love the most and what is the most challenging part of the job from where you sit today?

WH: I think as former owners and operators, there’s nothing that beats excitement of approaching opening day. And that could be for a sprawling resort or a tiny bar or restaurant, but because we love the symphony of all the talents and all the people and all the ideas, typically it’s been a long collaborative process. It’ll be, if not many years, it’s certainly many months or close to several years. But to see that all come together, to hear the music start to kick on, to see the staff start running around and setting up the plays to the final styling tweaks, to seeing hopefully pleasant looks on all the stakeholders that are within that project and have it come together, I think that’s incredibly exhilarating and nothing really matches that energy. I think we’re all a little bit addicted to that.

AF: We’re a lot addicted.

GB: Yeah, I mean that opening night is certainly, it’s like the cherry on top, but I think that one of the things that has been a nice collaboration with all of us is each one of us kind of has a little bit of a superpower we like to say. And so I think each one of us might have a different way that we might think about that. I loved just the initial ideas and everything is just so they’re so ripe with possibility in the very beginning. And so that beginning stage is just as exciting for me as that end stage. And sure, call me the architect geek of the group, but I like sitting down and sketching out every last little detail in design development. But every one of us has a different kind of superpower.

SSR: I love that. What are your strengths and weaknesses? 

AF: Kristina is an incredible oracle. I’ll start with her. I mean, honestly, she can figure out how to pull ideas out of the ether, and I think that’s partially why she has generally engineered the magic paper process throughout our entire lives. And again, it started not just as a company, but even before then she was often sort of sitting down and trying to understand how to connect the dots for each of us. And she does the same thing for the company as well. So it’s an incredible superpower to sort of figure out how these things all connect.

GB: I think Adam has this incredible ability of knowing what’s most important and being able to edit stuff in this very clear way where you’re like, no, I want to hold onto that. That’s really important. He’s like, that’s not going to make the most impact. He’s able to get getting to the heart of what’s really important in a design.

KO: Yeah, I would add to that too. I think Adam has a real joy. He brings just tremendous play and joy, and this is something that’s really hard when you’re under stress, you’re trying to get through a project, an operation, something difficult. He’ll come in with a lot of joy and play no matter what it is. I’ve come into the studio and I’ll hear Adam at one end of the studio making crowing noises, and I’ll hear William at the other end of the studio responding. It’s madness in there. It’s like a play pin, but I think Adam drives a lot of this just joy and play.

I would say too, something about Gregory, we all sit in meetings and we’ll be talking about this idea, that idea, this is going to go here. We should put this object in the middle. And Greg will have his head down and he won’t say anything for 20 minutes, and he’ll pull up his sketchbook and every idea we just mentioned will be sketched poetically,

AF: Three dimensionally, perfect perspective.

KO: The most elegant interpretation of what we all were just talking about. And it’s just kind of great where he can actually take all of that information and pull it into something as poetic as these beautiful line drawings in real time in 20 minutes.

AF: I think William as well, we can’t leave him out. I think he’s got an incredible sensitivity to aesthetics that is almost supernatural. I mean, I have to briefly quickly mention this story where we were doing a project and he asked the contractor to paint no fewer than 60 samples of the color black on the wall. I think it was closer to a hundred, but, and each of them, I mean I looked at it, it was like, dude, just pick one. It’s fine. They change a lot when the light of the day. He’s sitting there for hours, just be feeling it. It was just crazy.

KO: Yeah, he’ll be in lighting too. He’ll be there for two hours just setting the lighting to perfection in each room, each light, how it’s going to be in different day parts.

AF: Remember we just opened Host in the fall, and at one point I came in and William was just standing in the space sort of looking up at, and I was like, what? For an hour? I was like, it’s almost like Rain Man-ish a little bit. I was like, what’s going on here, dude? What are you looking at? He’s like, that green is not quite right. I was like, it’s fine. And we’re opening tonight. So next thing I know, he got the paint can out, and he’s up on the ladder.

WH: We repainted it. It was the wrong green that was up there, so we fixed it. It was good.

SSR: So that’s like a strength and a weakness.

WH: It’s definitely torture.

SSR: Well, you brought up Host on Howard. Tell us is your most recent self-propelled project or your ownership, tell us about that. It’s a really interesting concept, and it speaks a lot of hospitality and what you all do very well.

KO: It’s our gallery gathering space at 21 Howard Street. It’s our favorite street in Manhattan. So we were so happy to get a space there. And it’s another celebration for us to be able to create in a space over a period of time where we can do the artwork. We have a whole bunch of lighting, trolleys, anything that’s a tool for gathering, we sell there, but it’s more than that. We’re bringing together interesting people at this intersection of food, wine, art, and design. And when we do our gatherings, we’ll get a chef that we love and we’ll get an artist that we love and we’ll have their crowds come together into that gathering. It creates an interesting soup. It’s a fun place space for us. It’s another one where we did a lot of just late nights, hands-on painting baseboards. It was a lot of our personal efforts going into that one.

GB: It’s also a place that we’re able to highlight a lot of the furniture and lighting that we’ve developed over the years. So it’s a lot. It does a lot. And it kind of brings in different interests. Of course, it had to have a bar because Adam was part of this. I think we all like the bar, but it is a nice place to highlight these other collaborations that we’re doing with other furniture manufacturers and things like that. And it’s not meant to throw everything in there. We’re kind of curating it to fit different kind of seasonal ideas that we’re doing in a more artful way. And it’s all about gathering people together and sharing this, having a social space that we can meet and hang out with the people we love.

SSR: So you have diversified your firm in many different ways. How do you think that’s helped you get to where you are today and really kind of create this all-encompassing kind of company that you had thought about at the beginning that wasn’t just an interior design firm?

KO: When we began, we didn’t have an idea that we would only be, I think Adam mentioned this, but that we would only be one thing. We had this kind of private motto of being idea driven, non-vehicle specific. And part of that is exploration because we want to have the exploration. But in terms of the firm at large, I think it’s helpful for our clients when we can do everything from F&B strategy to concepting, to interior design, to furniture design and brand at the end. I mean, it’s very all inclusive, so the ideas don’t get lost in the middle. So while we still do those independently, some clients don’t go all the way through. I think it’s most valuable when we can integrate a more holistic approach.

SSR: Has there been one project of late that you think really speaks to what you hope to create with AvroKO and hope to create with your spaces? 

AF: Nuri Steakhouse opened recently.

KO: That’s beautiful.

AF: A stunner.

KO: There’s been a lot of beautiful things open recently.

GB: I think Nuri is definitely one of those. It was a client that wanted everything, and it became a great opportunity for us to sink into a lot of just every last detail that we possibly could. It’s great when we can find that shared passion with our clients, and we’ve learned a lot from clients, but we value longstanding relationships with clients too. So while Nuri is one project that was recently completed,  we’re also very appreciative of projects that we’re doing right now as well with longstanding clients. We’re doing Single Thread as one of the projects that we’re proud of from a number of years ago. But Kyle and Katina Connaughton are two of the clients along with Tony Greenberg. But we are doing two more projects with them right now. And having developed that such a strong relationship with them where there’s shared values, we are excited about these upcoming projects too. And this goes across the board with a number of other clients.

KO: Those two in particular live in Sonoma. That’s where Single Thread is and where all the projects we’re working on with them are. Kyle and Katina come over to our land and they bring the whole staff and we do cookouts together there too. So I think a lot of the client work that we’re talking about, it’s relationship becomes this huge thing beyond the projects. And I know that there’s a lot of clients that I know, for instance, Adam works with that are part of that family as well.

AF: Michael Stillman is a good friend of ours. We started doing work with him years ago. We just finished a project for him called Twin Tails that we’re all incredibly proud of. And I think we’ve done something like 18 projects with Michael. The guys from Boka. We’ve done maybe 15 or 16 projects with them. We’ve got a new project with them opening in Nashville soon. There’s Barry Sternlcht with 1 Hotel. We started working with him in 2007 on a project that never came to life. And then eventually we did the first 1 Hotel in Central Park and West Hollywood. We’re about to open a project in Copenhagen for the 1 Hotel that we’re doing with Norm Architects. That is going to be a beautiful space. And we’re working on another 1 Hotel in Rome. So it’s sort of like this continuity of relationships of enjoying great operators who care about craft, who have a desire to sort of participate, as Greg was saying, and collaborate in meaningful ways. And the projects are meaningful and beautiful because you kind have this great how to dance together. You, it’s never stepping on each other’s toes. We’re working on a project with Sam Fox right now at Twelve Thirty club in Austin. We did the first one with them in Nashville with Sam and Justin Timberlake. And we’re starting to talk about even more projects together. I think we vibe with a lot of our clients in a very special way, as Kristina was saying. And it’s not just like, oh, we’re working together, but we actually enjoy them. We actually like them.

Audience Question: Is there an idea yet to be realized that each have got one?

KO: I have such a longterm, not-yet realized idea. I’ve been talking about it since my 20s, so it’s way, way, way long time. But there was something I have called Elder Farm, which is a way to create a village or a community that you can age into that’s modern, sustainable, etc. Some interesting ideas now that are available to us that weren’t available to us 20 years ago. So I’ve talked to the partners about this endlessly. So we’re hoping that eventually we’ll be able to build this idea, this community.

AF: It’s somewhere between co-living and communal, having individual small spaces, but then having communal spaces that you share with the community. We’ve come close to doing it.

KO: We’re getting closer.

GB: I’m hoping that we can do this on our own private island somewhere. I would love to design an entire island resort. We talk about holistic design, but throw in landscape design and urban planning in that as well. I think that would be a dream. And boat design.

Audience Questions: How do you all work so well together and still love each other and kind of all live together after 25 years? It’s exceptional. What is that structure? Do you check in? Is it two against two, three against one? Did you already talk about that?

WH: Kristina clearly has been the glue for us from the beginning. Her energy and empathy and perseverance with the three of us, I’m sure we can get a little annoying at times. We all have our unique relationships with her. I know that there are conversations she’ll have with the three of us that are tailored to our unique personalities and needs and quirks. That helps keep things flowing. But we all have a lot of great respect for each other. Because we do bring so many different things to the table, we appreciate that and rely on that and feel, and because of that, we feel so much safer to take a lot of the risks we’ve taken over the years in companies and just life moves,

So there can be disagreements for sure. There’s probably been an argument or two, but we always hug it out. At the end of the day, we never hold grudges. We make sure that we can always remember the friendship and what got us into this in the beginning. And we always put the commitment to friendship and our AvroKO family first over commercial concerns. So even if there are decisions that might end up being a little painful financial, which breaks a lot of groups apart, breaks a lot of families apart, breaks a lot of companies apart, we always remember that’s integral.

Audience Question: The first question was what’s magic paper? And then the second question I had, when someone comes up with an idea, what is needed in order to take action on that and build that momentum to a point where it just keeps going.

KO: I made the magic papers up. It’s completely a construct, but it’s a construct we’ve had since before we formed AvroKO. It’s generally a way to sit with both in a group and individually sometimes to ask a myriad questions that are very complicated. So if a person hasn’t thought about those things yet, which could include things about unmet desires, this is really big. What’s an unmet desire? And if the world was your oyster and you could do anything, there were money, time, resources weren’t an issue. So they can be questions like that, but it’s very intuitive because it’s that person, that moment. When we’re doing it together, we document it. So we’ll sit for three days in a cabin, documenting, documenting. And I have magic papers from over the years in each of our handwriting. So you don’t know who’s taking notes and who’s paying more attention to what.

But we’ll go down the rabbit hole with each other. And it’s not just business strategy, which I would probably pronounce that very strongly. It’s emotion plus business strategy. And in terms of ideas, I think that comes down to everybody’s throwing ideas out. You might get your idea done that following year, or you might not get it done for another three years. So it’s not that the idea comes. And then we do every idea, we’ll discuss it and we’ll start looking at the pros and cons and also where it intersects with someone else’s passion. There’s an intersection there of us coming together to support that, or all four of us feel like it’s something we can passionately get behind. So it’s pretty organic how we decide which idea. But I would say the magic papers and that process, the documenting of that process. So we’ll go all the way back and we’ll capture old magic papers and see what off of them. I don’t think there’s anything that we haven’t been able to pick off over 25 years because we’ve had a long time to do it.

SSR: And these are what you do when you talked about the summit, when you guys sit with each other for three days every year, which I also think is super special and unique.

KO: We have different kinds of summits with our leadership. Also the annual one, that’s just us, will be five days total, but we mess around for two days and sit together the other three. So there’s a lot of play in there too.

Audience Question: You guys have such great work and it’s a layered and dynamic, and when you’re building off a concept, then you start executing in design. And so what is your process for references to get inspired? 

GB: I think we get inspired by so many things, and I think that’s one of the things that we mentioned a little bit here, is we always start with the idea. And so the beauty of that is it kind of allows us to have lots of inspirations and we can find these collisions or these contrasts. And I think the best work comes out of, again, we’ve mentioned this idea of thinking sideways, like not finding the obvious thing and trying to mash a couple very disparate things together or three very different things together. But that the best of those allow us to find inspiration not only in the concept but in some details or some other aspect if you’re looking at robots and trying to integrate that in with a farmhouse. I’m just throwing in that there. We haven’t done that before, but you have something to draw from for a lot of just unique ideas that can go down into that fine detail. I think that’s where a lot of the really cool stuff comes from. Yeah, you look at some crazy light fixture, but it might’ve been based on some old circuit board or something like that. And so not trying to find the obvious or actively trying to avoid the obvious and finding some fun contrasts.

SSR: So I’m going to ask my final question, which has been, you can go either way. What has been the best piece of advice you’ve received or your greatest lesson learned over the last 25 years?

WH: Don’t work with your friends. We love ignoring advice. So you see how that went? We have so many. I think it’s hard to narrow it down. I think the biggest lesson learned was the value of the decided commitment that we all gave each other. And I think that that’s trickled down into a lot of our client relations, our staff relations, our restaurants and our other businesses. But just for us in particular as friends, that it all worked because of that commitment. And I think that lesson of just of doubling down on trust and loyalty and just never thinking about any alternative was I think one of our secrets of success as well to just, there was no other choice. We just doubled down. And I think that was a great lesson learned.

KO: And you have to make, it’s funny, it’s like there is no other choice and you have to keep making that choice that there’s no other choice over and over again. Very hard to do. This is why 70 percent of partnerships fail in the first three to five years. I would say four person partnerships where nobody is in a relationship over friends for 35 years and business for 25 years. I bet it’s 99 percent fail. It’s so easy at different junctures of life, at different ages to make a different choice and to say, this is it. , I would say greatest lesson learned is the nourishment of being indefatigable and being able to say, no matter what, the trust is there, things aren’t going right. We are here. We’re going to do it together. Nobody steps out.  We stay in line together, hold on together and go forward. And if you can do that for epic periods of time, the joy and the nourishment from that is unbelievable. It’s unbelievable. So I would just say there’s huge value and I hope there’s more business models in the future that are structured this way.

SSR: We’ll end with that. It is a four way marriage, but I love it. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for being here again.