Craig Stanghetta

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, I’m here with Craig Stanghetta from Ste. Marie. Thanks so much for being here today. How are you?

Craig Stanghetta: I’m super, how are you doing? Thanks for having me. Much appreciated. Excited to be chatting with you.

SSR: Me too. All right, so let’s dive in. Where did you grow up?

CS: Well, I grew up in a small town in Northern Ontario, Canada called Sault Ste. Marie. It’s a sort of twin city between Ontario, Canada and Michigan, which is called Sault Michigan. And it was a sort of industrial steel town with a large Italian immigrant population. That’s where my dad’s side comes from, Italy. So my great-grandfather moved there. A large wave of Italian immigrants moved there to work at the steel plant, I think probably in the 1930s maybe, something like that.

So it’s an interesting little spot, very Canadian, very sort of rural but with this kind of gritty steel town vibe in a way. But it also like a lot of Northern Ontario has a deep roots with the First Nations community and French Canadians. So that’s kind of the whole mix of cultural influences for me.

And the studio is very loosely named on the town. So our studio is called Ste. Marie, which I always thought was like, for me, kind of the irony of naming the studio Ste. Marie, which to me always sounded like this cool sort of fashion label like an Yves Saint Laurent or something like that but happened to be referring to this kind of northern steel town was kind of a cheeky nod in a way.

SSR: Yeah. Well, you answered my next question, that name come from. What were you like as a kid? Was there any hint or looking back indication that you might get into design or hospitality?

CS: Well, I mean a couple of things. So on the hospitality side, my family owned the oldest hotel in the city. It was called the Algonquin Hotel. And my grandfather ran it, my dad and his brother and his sister and their younger brother. My dad and his brother were twins, and they grew up in this hotel. So, running around, working there, sweeping the floors, dishwashing, bartending. And at holidays, we would go for all of our…

So my uncle, my dad’s twin, inherited the hotel to run it. My dad wasn’t particularly interested, but we would celebrate all of our Christmases there. And so we would have dinner up in the one restaurant and then the kids would go downstairs into the bar and play pool and drink pop out of the pop gun. I think the first time I had any beer was just pouring beer into a half glass of Coke or Pepsi or something like that, and drinking at our family get-together.

So we sort of grew up in that environment and my brothers and I sort of had little odd jobs that we would do there. So we were in the hospitality world, and my family on my dad’s side in our hometown, which is in Le Marche, Italy, had a pizzeria. And we had some relatives in Michigan that had a restaurant. So we sort of were in that world growing up. And so a lot of my memories around food and gathering were sort of in the hospitality space.

And then the other side of it is I sort of grew up, like most kids, I was really into sports. I was very kind of competitive as a kid and into gymnastics. And I did that and played a bit of hockey. And then I sort of found my way into playing soccer. And I did that pretty seriously until I was about 18. But along the way, I started to find my way into the theater, which just seemed like a cool thing to do.

And that ended up being the path that I followed for a while. But when I was a kid, I was really into, I don’t know, furniture and aesthetics and stuff like that. For some reason, I was always moving. My mom would be… My parents were divorced, had a single mom, and she’d be away at work and then she’d come home and I’d moved all the furniture around and sort of redone the layout of the house and stuff like that. And I was always mucking around with how my room was set up.

So I guess I kind of had that interest, but didn’t really know that you could follow that profession where I grew up. The idea of a guy going into design just seemed so completely untenable. Maybe architecture, I had a good friend that followed that path but I didn’t want to make buildings. I didn’t respond to the idea of structure and form in that way. I liked this idea of mood and how people hung out and that kind of thing.

And I think that’s partially why I ended up studying in the theater because I liked that notion of being kind of transported and this kind of escape and atmospheric component of that. So that was my childhood in a way, sports and this other side that I didn’t really know what to do with. I was kind of just, yeah.

SSR: I love it. So theater, is that what you ended up ultimately following? Did you go to school for it? Tell us. Well, first too before you do that, is there any cool fun stories from the hotel besides making your own bar with the Coca Cola? But anything you remember from that running around there?

CS: Well, what I just remember is just, this is not a fancy hotel. We’re in this small town and it was… Because it’s an old hotel, the rooms were small. It had a bar that people would hang out at, and they’re kind of rough and tumble sort of places. But if you think of the ’80s, which is when I grew up, it was honestly the place was like a sitcom. It was like those casts of characters that were around there would just be, either they’re working the desk or they would be hanging out at the restaurant in the bar.

And I kind of just remembered that. I just remember this kind of really, I don’t know, almost like a kind of Diane Arbus cast of folks that were also very nice and warm, but where they were certainly not the affluent of society. So even though it was a hotel atmosphere, it wasn’t this kind of glam version of it.

And I think actually I’ve, over the years, because I have such warm memories of that and spent so much time hanging out there. And the city in itself, it’s quite beautiful from a nature standpoint and spending a lot of time like that. But the kind of people, again, we’re working class people. And so I’ve always kind of maybe romanticize that in a way. So a lot of our work sort of oscillates in a way between celebrating those kind of places in some respects and finding this beauty in that kind of things.

We obviously work in the world of true luxury these days as well, which is not that at all. It’s much more about really embracing this sort of dream of what something can be. But certainly a ton of our work has been finding the beauty in the kind of, it’s almost like the less glamorous side of people in places. And we do a ton of work in a Chinatown of a city or this little sort of dive bar or coffee shop off the beaten path.

And so actually just thinking about that, talking to you now, it’s never something that’s really crystallized for me. But I think I’ve definitely found a way to romanticize that side of things because of that cast of characters that was in that property.

SSR: Love that. Okay. Well, always get to look back, right? Think back. All right. So you had a love for theater. Is that what you ended up pursuing? Did you go to school for that? Or tell us the next steps.

CS: Yeah, I did. So certainly even in high school, I was sort of like you’d have woodshop or stuff like that. And I remember starting to, I would try to make and refinish furniture and build this table and do all that. So I was doing that stuff. But in terms of a true outlet, we ended up interestingly having this really kind of strong little theater scene, and again, in this town. And you listen to some of these actors that are on a show like this, and they sort of find their way into a bit of a community that way. And that’s where they sort of ignites this passion for whatever, maybe it’s their actors or directors or filmmakers or in the theater.

And that’s sort of what happened to me. I just sort of found this passionate group of people that were quite capable of doing that stuff. And so yeah, maybe it was like 15 or so started to do these plays and we did a lot of Shakespeare, which was really… I wasn’t much into school, but always read a lot. I was a really avid reader. And so finding that way to bridge, getting lost in the story but then bringing that stuff to life.

And then the idea of the Shakespeare stuff was, it’s obviously quite challenging to really understand that work at first. It really is almost like a different language but being, I guess, welcomed as a young man to sort of figure that out and participate and learn your way through and fumble, and then knowing that ultimately you’ve got to perform this. And so that notion of this kind of deadline or this, the show is happening whether you like it or not.

And that was really good for me because I was kind of highly distracted. I was not focused on school. But that notion that you were like, you got to show up, you got to perform, you got to be prepared and kind of put yourself into a scenario that you can’t really get yourself out of that really galvanized something for me.

And so yeah, it was pretty serious about the theater stuff and learning the theories around storytelling and acting. And this really neat thing happened where the guy that was our sort of, he was an artistic director of this little theater, and he would put on these shows. And he found this old kind of barn that had been converted into this music camp out in the country.

So you know how kids go to summer camp where you canoe and learn how to, I don’t know, tie knots and shoot arrows and stuff like that. Well, what we ended up doing was going to this camp that was for making theater. And we would put on this show every year, and they would fly in these really interesting kind of other teachers, whether it’d be movement or voice or this kind of clown and stuff like that. Really just these specialties in that world and that you would get to explore.

So we would do that in this old barn, and then we would learn a play whether it’s Romeo & Juliet. It was always Shakespeare actually in this thing. And that ended up being my summer job where I was the counselor there. And then I would have a pretty big part in these plays and I would help teach the kids and me and my really good friend, we would build all the sets and the lights and do all that kind of stuff.

So I was really immersed in this. And also just, again, being a young guy that I knew, sports was maybe an outlet for me but this really was a great way to focus my, I guess creative energy and just have this way of expressing yourself. Well, you’re actually working and had a sense of discipline and accountability and all that.

So I think that’s really what I was sort of took to, and there was all this theory around how you make theater and how you commit to a role and how people kind of commune in space together. That magic that kind of happens when you’re gathering in a space, sharing some sort of experience in the storytelling elements, so obviously super strong.

But what I thought what I always loved and what we kind of try to emulate in the studio environment is this notion of play and experimentation and how like when you’re rehearsing for something, you’re making a lot of mistakes. You’re sort of fucking around and it’s really dynamic, and there’s an interplay between this person’s work and that person’s work.

And somebody might be on and figuring something out and somebody might be like, I’m not quite there, but you have to continually work together. And that kind of idea of that collective creativity has really… Well, I really, really always loved that.

So yeah, I went and studied theater. I did a Bachelor of Fine Arts at a school called York University in Toronto that was a conservatory acting program. It’s like 15 people in the class. And so that was my university. And you get up early and go and roll around on the floor and pretend you’re an animal for a few hours and do study fencing and singing and do all that stuff.

So I did that in a highly concentrated way for about four years and did a bunch of plays. And I was certainly convinced that that was what I was going to sort of dedicate my life to.

SSR: How did you get into hospitality then? How did you go from being a play actor into this?

CS: Well, when I was studying in school, in my summers I’d have my part-time job. And so I would be back working in restaurants. So all throughout high school, I should mention I was cooking as my job. That was my job. So I was always in restaurants, so I’d start as a dishwasher and then I was a short order cook. I cook fish and chips and did all that stuff.

SSR: Were you good at cooking?

CS: I mean, I was very good as a line cook because I was superfast, and I liked how dynamic it was. And so I like to just think on my feet that way. Again, I think I was probably undiagnosed ADD. So stuff that was a thousand things happening at once was very comfortable for me.

SSR: I like it. It was undiagnosed then.

CS: Yeah. Thinking back, I’m like, yeah, definitely. But yeah, so we did that. But when I went to university, I would start working front of house. I work as a waiter and I was a terrible waiter though. Terrible waiter. I remember, here’s an interesting story. I remember I had my first waitering job, and it was at a place called the Pickle Barrel. It was a sort of Jewish restaurant in Midtown Toronto. And first day on the job, I was carrying a bowl of soup over to a table, and I had the soup my left hand, and I had a drink in my right hand and I had to pass the drink across the table to the mom.

And I remember I was trying to reach over the table to pass this drink to her. Meanwhile, she was just yelling at me and I was so confused. I was like, I don’t understand why she’s yelling at me. The drink’s fine. But when I finally clocked into what was happening, I could finally understand, she was yelling at me, “You’re spilling soup all over his head.” And while I was passing the drink, I was literally just dumping this hot soup on her son’s head.

SSR: Oh my God.

CS: And that kind of sums up my capabilities as a waiter in one story. But anyway, whatever, I did that for a bunch of years despite my failings. So I was in restaurants, so I still loved being in restaurants. I just thought the action and the kind of camaraderie, and obviously it’s a fun job to have. You kind of party afterwards.

And again, it’s a bunch of young people trying to make a lot of fast money. You’ve got a bunch of cash in your pocket after the fact. And yeah, restaurants, you could always tell that there was just something quite magical about how families would get together. Despite the waiter pouring hot soup on their child’s head, they still somehow find a way to have a good time. And I just always thought it was a cool place to be.

And so I was studying theater in university while that was happening, and it never really dawned on me that those two things could really have anything in common until after the fact. But I left school and started to work as an actor, mostly in theater in Toronto.

And then eventually I moved to, I didn’t move to Vancouver. I went out there as a kind of lark to visit a friend. I had broken up with a girl I was dating at the time, and I was kind of having a summer of maybe a little too much fun in a way. So I was like, I got to go for a minute.

I was still working in the theater, doing all my auditions and all that stuff, having an agent and that kind of thing, and get a little part in a little tiny film here or do a play here, do that and just sort of just like, it was bopping around in the city. All your friends are either in bands or they’re artists or they’re actors. So we were having a great time.

I was just completely immersed in the world of art. It was wonderful. But that particular summer, I was probably a little too free and I was like, I should probably just duck out and have a change of scenery. I had a close friend who was in Vancouver, and I just sort of went out there to visit him.

I ended up getting an agent out there. And out there it was kind of, they did a lot of American-based TV series, usually for the CW or sci-fi network and stuff like that. And I don’t know, maybe it was just sort of something was clicking a bit, but I started getting these parts and these TV shows. And I got, it was still struggling and it was still living as a really scrappy mid-20-year-old artist.

But I ended up getting this part in this show called Flash Gordon. It was a pretty big part. It was like this leader of the rebel army kind of thing. And I remember just being, for me, it was a big role. And so I was elated, called my mom, tell her I got this big part, so excited. And then I got the script and I sat down. And I went to this little French bistro because I was like, oh, I’m going to make some money so I could celebrate. I could buy a nice glass of wine. I’m going to have a steak or something like that.

I remember sitting there and doing that and reading the script. And then coming from the background in the theater where I was pretty snobby about the writing and the art and the work. I read this sci-fi show and I was like, “Oh fuck. Is this what I’m going going to do?” And like no, not to discount that stuff, it’s highly entertaining. And it was a great show and there was really accomplished people that do that. But it wasn’t what I wanted to do. It wasn’t what I felt like passionate about.

That was a real turning point for me. I had always, throughout school, I was always like continued in the design sort of as this kind of pretty serious hobby. And I was always, again, making stuff and helping friends that had a little design projects. Maybe they’re, “Hey, we got a little retail store, we’re fixing up a gallery,” or something like that. I was always doing, “Maybe I’ll build some fixtures for you. I’ll help you understand the design.”

I was always doing stuff kind of like that. In fact, when I moved to Vancouver, I had this little studio space. So I was trying to find how I could apply that outlet. So I would go into the studio and I would work on just sort of pieces of furniture, make odd things, and was still bopping around helping people design things. They just kind of knew me a bit in that way, but I was still pursuing this acting thing.

But when I got that part, which I thought was this idea of, oh, you’re going to make real money and you could maybe sort of leverage this into being like do something in television, the opposite happened to me. I felt like this existential dread that I had maybe made a terrible mistake committing my life to this kind of thing. And I didn’t change anything immediately. Went and did the show. And it was kind of cool and interesting in a way. But it was certainly, I knew in this sort of my bones that I was not in my right spot.

So then I really committed to pursuing the design side of things and just doing stuff that… Again, I had no road map. I didn’t know what I would do or how I would do it, but I knew that I just wanted to do that. And I was like, what’s the difference? Just go all in. And I had this kind of weird little moment where maybe I was pretty much, I just did it. I don’t know why. I didn’t have a logical reason, but I just felt really compelled to make that commitment. And that happened right at that time, and I started to just do it more seriously.

And the first thing that I did in any kind of real way was I had, my partner and I, she’s my wife, we’re still together, and she was very trusting but we had this loft. And I was like, “Listen, I’m just going to redo this whole place.” And God bless her, she was like, okay. She was just completely supportive and was like, “Yeah, of course you should.”

And so I redid the loft, soup to nuts. And there was not a lot of like, the internet was not focused in that way. There’d be a couple of blogs that you could go on. But you would go and get books still and magazines. And so I was just deeply immersed in the world of design. And I always had been as a serious hobbyist, but at that point, I just was going all in on this.

And so I built lights for the spot, I did all the flooring, I poured the countertops, built all the millwork. And I was just learning all that stuff because I had no choice. I just was like, “Well, no one’s going to straight up hire me to just do this. And if I want to make something, I have to just make it.”

And again, I think I sort of lucked into a lot of things in that way because I had this kind of hospitality background. I studied the theater, and then by virtue of just circumstance, I learned how to value making things, how to actualize stuff in the built environment and how things took time and how quality didn’t come for free. And that there was a bunch of specificity and effort and course correction and challenges that come in making stuff.

And so I made that whole loft. It was our home. Our daughter was born there. It was pretty magical place. And we would host friends. We’re young. We were like 28 at the time or something like that. And we would have parties there. And so everyone was, they’d be like, “Oh, where did you get this chandelier?” And I was like, “Well, I built it.”

SSR: Made it.

CS: Yeah, and everything like that. And so it became a bit of a thing. And so all of our pals at the time were mid to late twenties, all in arts or hospitality and cool restaurants.

And the sort of break for me came when our good friend was over and she kind of thought the place was cool. And she’s like, “Listen, I’m kind of fucked because I took over this lease in Chinatown.” She’s second or third generation Chinese. She was like all her dream was to make this new version of a Chinese restaurant, didn’t have the fluorescent lamps overhead but really valued the tradition of the food.

And again, similar, had a background in her family, everything revolved around the table in a way. And she had spent a bunch of time in London. It was like this great bartender and just a really interesting capable person but it never had her own spot. But similarly, just said, “If I’m going to rip off the band-aid, I’m going to go all in on doing my own place.”

But she was a little ahead of herself and she was like, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve got a contractor and he is starting to build this place, but I’m not feeling confident and I’m not sure how I’m going to get to the end of this project.” And I was like, “Well, let me just come by and then we’ll go from there.”

So I remember the issue she had was that they were starting to build the form for the banquettes, and they were a little tall and they’re a little too high. And when you get into the mechanics of doing this where you’re like-

SSR: Nothing works.

CS: Yeah. You’re like, “Well, that’s not great.” That’s a little bit of a steakhouse kind of vibe. And it’s not super social and supposed to be this, almost like this kind of brasserie bistro kind of meats, Chinese cuisine sort of thing.

So it had this, that was her vision anyway. And she had this like, this was before you had put everything on a board of some sort or have a lookbook or something. She had all these scraps. It was like, “I have this really cool matchbook that I got at this bar in Paris that I just think is cool and interesting, and I have all these old pictures of my family and I have this menu, and I have this… And I love this scrap of fabric.” And it was like she had real stuff.

And I was like, “Well, I totally get what you’re trying to do. I understand the narrative of what you’re trying to pull out and make.” And I was like, “Okay, why don’t we do this? I know you can’t afford to just hire me straight up to design the place, but I want to do it and I get it and I think I could help you. But in order to pay me, I’ll come and work with your contractor.”

So I got paid whatever it was at the time, I don’t know, 15 bucks an hour or something like that. And I just went in there and I worked with the contractor and we’d make all the tables. And then evenings and weekends and in a kind of blitz before we were too deeply into the construction process, her and I were putting together design ideas and starting to cobble it all together and sketch things out. And I was like, “Look, I’ll go shopping in these places and I’ll buy a bunch of stuff and bring it back.”

And anyway, that ended up being my first project and it was a place called Bao Bei. It’s still around today. It’s kind of neat because our office is next door now. And we have since done two other projects with her, a place called Kissa Tanto and another place called Meo, both of which have been pretty cool and remarkable. And we’ve kept this kind of shorthand of how we work together.

But that was kind of this transition for me where I just helped do it. The place was wildly successful luckily. And it’s maybe not our style now, I think, but we are still proud to go in there today. And it feels right, still feels warm. It still feels like a reflection of her and her family and how it’s not… I still got a bit of a cool vibe to it and all that stuff. But I think it sort of taught me that that idea of how you have a degree of listening and empathy and how you find your way into the world and how these little bits and pieces can almost act as like this sort of talisman that give you access to a world beyond. And your job is almost like Archeology in a way to put things together.

So I just felt very lucky because all these kind of little circumstances fumbled into place to set me up to actually pursue this kind of stuff. And so that’s my little origin story of how I got to at least start designing.

SSR: So I guess my question is did you love it as much? That first project, did that submit you’re like, okay, this is where I need to be versus acting here?

CS: Oh, yeah. Right away I was like, “This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.” I called, I had an agent, she was wonderful, nice, great person. And I called her and I was like, “I’m doing this other thing.” And she was obviously like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. It seems insane.” But I was just fully all in on that and started to build a studio.

But the good thing and bad thing about starting in a market like Vancouver, which is quite small, the good side of it is things go quick. Everyone sort of knows each other. The reputation of a place travels. A nice thing about working in the world of restaurants and hospitality is obviously there’s media attention there, and so there’s exposure and that kind of thing.

So that obviously worked well because you start to, people are like, “Well, maybe you could do this project for us, maybe you could do that one.” And that’s what I did. I was sort of drinking from the fire hose right away. And then I had to learn the whole other side of how you turn this into a real [business].

SSR: So when did you decide to launch? When did it become real or less as little jobs, but more like the name and this is going to be a business and this is my future?

CS: The name took a while, but pretty much right away I was committed to doing it as a business and started to, I have probably got two or three things right away. And so the idea of working on multiple things at once is a real learning curve as anyone who starts their own practice will attest to as you start, or anyone who’s working in a studio that’s set at more senior design level. You have to learn how to change the gears in your brain between projects. And we’re always sort of style agnostics, so to speak, that we’re always trying to mine the kind of personal narrative or this kind of world building idea.

So it came quick. And so I had to start hiring folks right away. I had no technical ability. I knew what it took for a place to be, which I still think is the most important thing for what it means to a guest, for what it means for people to meet and gather and how to match beauty with functionality and have this embedded story and all that stuff but I didn’t. Technically, I had no idea what I was really doing, so I had to start hiring people right away. And then inevitably you’re like, okay, well I got to learn some mechanics and business metrics or else how do I pay people? You got to get office space, start dealing with hardware and software and just everything. So it just all happens at once.

And then thankfully, I didn’t, in a way, I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but we didn’t think about this idea of building a studio or a brand or a point of view for our thing. It was really like we were just going into the project trying to just be completely immersed in the world of our clients.

And clients is not even a good word for it. They were just our friends. So you just felt completely beholden to making it work for them. And I also knew enough about restaurants to know that you got to do this amount of volume, we got to talk about seat counts and guest check averages. And I always had that knowledge because I worked in the business, came from that background.

So I think that was also why we started to get a lot of projects in the restaurants because people would just be comfortable, just talking to me straight up about like, “Yeah, I got to figure this out like how do we program the space. We should think about managing the menu and the drinks program and the pricing strategy. And then you start.”

And the other thing that was a really happy accident was when we were doing Bao Bei, I met a good friends of mine that were sort of starting out as a brand agency as well. And she was from Australia, super talented graphic designer. But this ended up being kind of their first project in Vancouver. And we ended up doing that together. So we were kind of starting out at the same time. So we ended up getting office space together as well at the same time.

And so that idea of how brand, brand storytelling, naming collateral, little guest touch points, all that stuff, which I have language for now but didn’t at the time, we quite organically grew those things in lockstep. So it would be that idea of working with clients in a sort of understanding their business and empathetically listening to them and knowing what they want to do, what their sort of dreams and aspirations are, where they come from and all that stuff, who they’ve got on their team, what their capabilities are, all those things that we now completely formally will figure out with people and have process and systems and checklists and kind of formal ways to deal with. They were just doing it all based on instinct and need in that.

And then working very early with the notion of brand, and brand strategy and concept and all that stuff, and having this really cool interplay between design and brand storytelling where design didn’t just live with us and then brand didn’t just live with them. We were in the same office together and growing our practices at the same time, and so we’re just spending time talking about our projects collectively and being like, “Well, you can do sort of maybe this kind of water-cut detail.”

And I wouldn’t be able to sort of do, I wouldn’t be able to do the file for that or the drawing. It wouldn’t even have a sort of facility to understand how to create the pattern. But my partners on the brand side would and we’d say, “Well, maybe that should happen in this piece of stone,” or we do this idea of a metal screen that’s done like that. So it started to just be a very fluid trade between disciplines.

And I think again, very lucky that that happened because I learned how to work that way. And as you know, I watched your interview with AvroKO at HD in Las Vegas, and I think so many people that thrive in the world of hospitality design understand the interplay between guest experience, brand storytelling, brand strategy, the built environment.

And so I just kind of got lucky that that was the way that I sort of fell into things, and I didn’t know any other way. So then when I’m building the studio, I’m every new person that comes in the door where they’re learning that way and it becomes foundational to who we were. And then afterwards, we started to be like, oh, now we got to really take the business seriously. And that’s mainly because you’re just responsible for a bunch of people. I mean, I had my daughter at that time, and so everything becomes quite real.

SSR: You got to grow up some day, right? Is there something that you know now that you wish you knew then? Or I’m always curious was what I always say, ignorance, bliss or just that organic growth easier than sitting down and creating a business plan of sorts?

CS: Well, I would say on the design, finding our way into how we run our studio, our methodology and process and all that, I wouldn’t change a thing. I actually think how we lucked into some circumstances was I couldn’t have sculpted it better if I had a kind of structured teaching. I think that was right time, right place, the right amount of pressure and everything to just go through the crucible and get there.

But what I really wish that I had some idea about was sort of two things, how to lead, how to be a boss and how to build culture and process and systems and how to just deal with pressure, and hire people and understand their strengths and how to qualify them coming in and be clear about what our goals are and who we are and what we do so that you can quantify fit as early as possible.

I wish I knew all that stuff because it’s so painful to learn it and everyone pays the price. It’s hard on your business, it’s hard on the people that come in and maybe they’re not a fit. They could be great people and they could have all of the ability in the world, but if you don’t fit together and you’re not sharing a common trajectory or goal, then nothing can improve that. And there’s a lot of hard lessons there where I just wish I was a better leader in that regard.

And it’s something I take very seriously now, and I think it’s almost the entirety of my job is learning that and helping teach my design directors and the leaders in our team how to coach and how to learn what people’s skills and challenges are and how to help people play to their skills, all that stuff. So I wish I knew that.

And then in a weird way, how to have predictable tools to run your business, how to have a dashboard of how to manage your business. Because again, you’re not as in those early days, you’re always in a reactive kind of way, which again makes decision making harder. It means you’re trying to put out fires and stuff like that, which is not the way that you, again, just not the way that you lead, not the way you run a practice, not the way that you commit to a positioning of who you are and get like-minded people coming back to you.

So all that stuff, I could have used that a little earlier. We found it, thank God along the way, but would’ve loved to have had that.

SSR: I think that’s really interesting you said that because we talk a lot about the business of design and how that’s not taught in school. So how are you supposed to figure out who you are as a leader and how to structure things and even processing. But I guess my question for you is how have you, so first restaurant on your own was 2008, right?

So it’s been 17-ish years. How have you changed as a leader? Is there still one part of the process that you love the most or that you still really get involved in because there are sacrifices as you grow, right?

CS: Yeah, of course. I think, again, one of the lucky things about how I came to this in a weird way was my lack of formal training because I had to hire for people that were better than me from early days, or better than me at obviously CAD and SketchUp and any kind of program that you use to propagate work.

But then I also, I just had to hire people in the realm of HR and additional leadership roles. And I’ve always benefited from just people who are whip smart and capable and come with loads of experience and just kind of getting out of their way and becoming very collaborative on doing that stuff.

And one of the things that happened part way through our evolution, we brought on a kind of financial, I guess would be a sort of external CFO who has since become a great, great friend of mine. And we’ve participated coming in an equity position in other businesses and co-created other things together.

And what he did was help us just create a full kind of system of metrics with which we predictively gauge our sales and create pipeline of business and quantify a bunch of soft markers in terms of how we’re positioning strategies, working how we monitor our resourcing and all that stuff so that the dashboard ends up being the sort of guideposts or the telltales. And being very definitive about what those are helps you, everybody who’s leading be like, well, these are the components with which we’re just guiding the health of the business.

And so that I think was great. And then so all of our leadership people were very clear about those markers and how we keep iteratively improving them. And then as you grow the business and have the luxury of being able to hire even more of high-level people, you start to be able to attract people that maybe would’ve come from a more corporate background or larger practices where they’ve just have the experience. They’ve either been there or they’ve benefited from learning from people that have steered the ship, so to speak, through some of these challenges.

And I’ve got a number of people like that that come from… Our managing director comes from a background at Burberry, for instance, and a bunch of larger practices. And so that person comes in as a partner in the business, and he just feels tremendously lucky to be able to say, “Okay, well, I’m going to go focus on this and let you run the show over here in a way.” And that’s sort of how that ladders down is I think really important.

And then, so what I do now is I’m still… My job technically in the business is as the creative director, and I sort of wear that hat in that role. And then I sort of take that hat off and wear the sort of founder and owner hat in some capacity where if I go and do a talk or a panel or something like that, I’m sort of playing that role in the ownership capacity and obviously that kind of thing.

But what I do in the business as my job is continue to help develop the conceptual work. We have an envisioning and concept and programming team that works on every project early days, and I’m very stitched into that part of the work, trying to create a north star for things.

And we run everything. Again, this whole theater side of things is kind of completely embedded in our process. And we’ve sort of reverse engineered all the stuff that was working to be now more formal and have pulled a number of extremely talented, capable people that are on in a strategy capacity and in a just very multidisciplinary where we sort of have a lot of inputs early days.

So I’m really stitched in with that group on every project so that we create the kind of narrative, this idea of what world are we going to manifest and create really strong tools that brief our whole team and in fact end up being sort of briefing tools for larger consultant teams or in-house management and stuff like that to say, “Okay, here’s where we’re going conceptually, this is the narrative, these are the values, these are some of the core principles of how we’re going to execute this,” and then we obviously distill that right down into a perspective on how materiality, character of material, obviously furniture, lighting, like everything.

And then as we move into the more formal schematic side of our design work, I’m deeply in there but really trying to give over as much control to the design team as possible. And the mandate is just take the work that we’ve kind of created that’s giving us a direction and fight for ways to turn it up more.

So the kind of principle for us is, and my job, the way that I really think of it is to come around and coach people on how to continue to find more juice for the squeeze in each section. I sort of burn off obviously a little bit more as it becomes more into technical documentation. We’ve got all the people that have checks and balances or technical directing team and all that handles that, but of course all that stuff sort of comes back to us. We’re still a boutique firm. There’s about 45 folks.

But I really think of my job as trying to find ways to make things more singular, more special, how do you work outside of the safety net of precedence and things like that. And then obviously convince our clients to come along for the ride and be enthusiastic participants.

SSR: Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And how big is your firm now? How have you grown?

CS: I think we’re about 45 folks all told. We have an office, this head office is still in Vancouver. We’ve put another office in Toronto, which is about 10 or 11 folks there. And we are pretty active in, I would say we’re pretty active in those two cities, obviously in western Canada, and then quite a bit of stuff in California, Chicago where I am right now. And we get a lot of opportunities kind of everywhere these days.

But we’re in maybe this awkward teen phase to be completely honest because we have enough credibility. We’re sort of get to contend for a number of awards. A bunch of our stuff performs well. We talked to a whole host of great hotel flags and brands and asset managers and we’re driving all that stuff.

But being at that stage, we do have this next little phase to grow through and mature as a business, which is actually very exciting, but also comes with its challenges. Just like every designer who’s listening to me, everyone knows that everything is much more painful than you get to elucidate in this kind of quick form. There’s everything. Every inflection point is tough and tricky, and it comes with a whole new level of learning and growth and people and client management and financial management.

And we’re obviously living in financial circumstances that are anything but predictable these days. So we’re doing all that stuff to navigate. But yeah, I would say a boutique firm that really wants to stay highly boutique and focused, but does want to ensure that we’re able to work on projects at scale because we believe that everything, like real placemaking for instance comes from caring about each individual user.

And we’re just really stubborn about trying to find that nuance and emotional engagement in everything, regardless of if it’s a master plan and you’re working on a hotel or a branded residence here, maybe there’s some rental ground floor retail, there’s a health and wellness component. All those things are just really stubborn about saying they’ve got to be emotionally resonant and you can’t shortchange the details, and it’s about emotionally capturing people.

And I think more and more these days we’re just fixated on that because if it doesn’t speak to people and if it doesn’t have this kind of human tactile nature, then it’s just adding to the overly kind of automated technical cold world that we are stubbornly vehemently against.

SSR: I think the challenge is always like, which are those details to fight for and which are the ones that will have the greatest impact when you’re dealing with budgets and clients and creating these spaces.

You start in restaurants, you’ve grown obviously. You do residential, commercial, you’ve done hotels, you’ve done coworking spaces. Is there another project that is on your bucket list that you’d like to as you continue to evolve and grow?

CS: For us, it starts to maybe small to medium-sized resort style stuff and a different, just a kind of perspective on what those can be. I think there’s just, and in a way it starts to be just this version of many of these components that we work on that’s starting to bring those more together in some of those kind of settings that keep things kind of intrepid and not overly manicured, that there’s some sense of adventure.

Personally, I’m really interested, I spent some time in Portugal last year, and I just think there’s some little places like that that are kind of on the cusp of being new little centers for travel. And this idea that there’s this kind of lived in more fluid luxury that I’m really quite into that is again, we just finished all of the common area and F&B spaces in the Rosewood Hotel Georgia, which is obviously quite a luxury property.

And so we like to swing over there, but we also like to kind of apropos of what we were talking about earlier. I like these things that are highly localized and a little bit idiosyncratic and maybe can only exist in this one place and maybe find, like this micro hotel idea I think is quite compelling in a way because it can be really specific to a locale and a specific user experience.

And those are things that I have my own sort of hospitality business with partners. We own a bunch of restaurants, but for us, we’re also interested in how we do some of these things as self-directed projects that we are in a sort of ownership capacity in as well. So that’s a big part of our business is keeping that entrepreneurial spirit connected to everything that we do.

And I think that’s part of the reason that some of the clients appreciate working with us because even though we’re kind dogmatic about this world building and idea that it’s got to be remarkable and transportive, we also know that it’s got to sort of pencil out at the end. And they trust that I’m living that with my own business over there.

So we’re kind of liking those things where there’s that entrepreneurial spirit, that idea of co-creation and coming in and making something come to life in that way. And I like this melding of what’s going on in the wellness space and the F&B and true hotel kind of side of things. I like these places that are starting to blur the lines with that and trying to find new ways.

I don’t like it when they get to be like cookie cutter where it’s like, you know what I mean? There’s your new spa circuit and all of a sudden it’s this new standard and just starts popping up everywhere. I think that’s kind of counterpoint to these things, but when people are starting to think through, oh, there could be a whole inventive side of what your wellness experience is like, and even though there’s standards there, it’s just like a restaurant in a way. You might be like, “Oh, well there’s this cooking type that we’re going to focus on here because that’s what we can own,” and our customer’s really seeking that and we can be the most special version of that.

And I think there’s a lot of potential in the wellness space like that and then these fully immersive environments, and there’s the sports and leisure side of it as well. I’m really into the world of tennis these days, and I’m just enamored with the idea of how far you could stretch some of that kind of thinking. So tennis would be a great one. A tennis based small resort would be probably my dream project where you get to bring all this stuff together, maybe put it, yeah.

SSR: Well, I play a lot of tennis.

CS: Oh, you do?

SSR: Do you play tennis?

CS: I do. I’ve been really into it the last three years, and it’s a kind of weird obsession I got to, yeah. It’s so fun. And it’s one of those things where it’s really a lot of data on the longevity side of that for tennis.

SSR: Yeah, no, I’ve probably played too much. We always end the podcast with the title, or the question that is the title of the podcast. So what has been your greatest lesson or lessons learned along the way?

CS: I think the kind of full circle thing that’s come to me is we started doing design by hearing other people’s stories and helping them kind of bring those to life. Like this idea of manifesting something and that places have something to say and that you could help, that your job is to be a conduit and sort of conjure those things.

And I think that’s been my biggest, if I was going to adhere to any principle, is you can’t muscle it. You’ve got to sort of tease it to life, and you could build all sorts of tools and stuff like that. And we as people, as sentient sensitive beings, I think have a real power to do that.

And I think that’s our, as design people, that’s our real remarkable ability. And if people hold true to that, that really is a great go-forward way of thinking about your role as a designer. And it’s not going to be replicable by an algorithm or a machine or AI in that way. It’s like the human side. And to embrace that there’s this kind of embedded life in space that wants to be sort of conjured to the surface might sound crazy and esoteric, but I’ve learned that it’s not.

SSR: Yeah. Well, I love your spaces and it was so great to hear your story today. So thank you so much for sharing it.