David Galullo

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, I’m here with David. Thanks so much for joining me today. How are you?

David Galullo: : I’m good. Thank you.

SSR: Yeah, thanks for joining. So we always start at the beginning at this podcast. So where did you grow up?

DG: I grew up in New Jersey in a little town called Hamilton Square, which was really just the middle of farmland when I was little. Now it’s really kind of a suburb of New York, if you will, even though it was a 45 minute train ride. It was a great place to grow up, and yeah, I moved on from there.

SSR: I’m a Jersey girl. Where is Hamilton place? I don’t know that.

DG: So Hamilton’s Square is kind of midway between Princeton and Trenton.

SSR: Okay. Okay. Gotcha. Great.

DG:  Yeah.

SSR: Love it. And did you have any inkling as a kid that you had a love for design? Were you creative as a kid?

DG: Yeah. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have some sort of drawing implement or scissors or paper in my hand. I was always creating something. My dad was a builder, so I grew up in a home that was kind of in constant renovation. Our dinner conversation would be, “Oh, maybe we should replace all the doors in the house.” It became part of my DNA that you constantly looked at improving the area around you and you never really took anything for granted. I really give a lot of credit to that for forming who I am and my ability to see something and see all the potential, and see beyond what it actually is today.

SSR: What did he build? Was he building houses or commercial projects or a mixture?

DG: Yeah, mostly residential. I think at some point he was doing more commercial things, retail and those kinds of things, but always liked residential. He was very outgoing, personable. He had lots of relationships and I think it was another thing that kind of informed my view of design, that it’s really about a relationship and getting in deep and understanding what something wants to be and how people want to use it.

SSR: Right. So did you end up going to school for design?

DG: Yeah, I went to Syracuse University in School of Architecture. When I came out realized that my view of design and my view of architecture was much more rooted in place making, how people came together and used spaces as a kind of a vessel for belonging and for gathering and building communities, then the formal kind of making of architecture. And that has guided me till today.

SSR: Right. And so what was one of your first jobs out of school? Or what was your path, I guess after school? What did you do?

DG: Yeah, so because my dad was a builder, he knew lots of architects. So in my first summer in my first year of school went to work for an architect that mostly did kind of historic restorations in Downtown Trenton, New Jersey. And so I worked in a lot of old… I remember my first real kind of go and do this kind of job was a renovation of what was an old, beautiful mansion in Downtown Trenton that had been used as a mortuary. It was a funeral home. And I had to go and measure it and do the drawings of this old building. There were caskets in the basement and it was one of those like, “Oh boy, this is-”

SSR: What did I get myself into?

DG: I’m not sure I signed up for this.

SSR: That’s amazing.

DG:  Yeah.

SSR: And so after school, did you go work for him or did you go somewhere else?

DG: After school, I realized that there was more world to see, so moved to Philadelphia. I worked for a firm there that did… It was actually two firms that had joined together. One that did healthcare, one that did restaurants and hospitality, and was really this interesting kind of merging of what at the time was seen as… Healthcare had very rigid standards, and there was a certain way that you did it. And hospitality and restaurant work was exciting and kind of no rules. And it was the merging of these two staffs that by all definitions shouldn’t have been really merged. It was an interesting time. I ended up working there for four years and doing a blend of work. I really prided myself in kind of riding between the two and not ever aligning myself with one side of the equation or the other, and seeing what you could learn by doing both of those. And again, my career has been marked with doing all kinds of work because I think it’s the boundaries that hold you back from really thinking about new ways of designing.

SSR: Right. Did you love the hospitality? Did that kind of set a path for you to want to do less residential and more maybe commercial?

DG: Yeah, I think my love of hospitality really came about in the storytelling aspect that it at the time for me really kind of infused me with this idea that you could really use design to make people connect to a part of themselves that maybe they didn’t normally connect to. That you could tell a story that was rich and meaning and could be artistically told and wasn’t strictly about the function of a space. Certainly function was important, but really kind of indexed over the theater, the kind of emotion of it. That really intrigued me in a lot of ways. From that point, I’ve spent most of my career since really doing commercial work in an array of worlds, if you will.

SSR: Many different worlds.

DG: Yeah.

SSR: So when did you end up starting Rapt Studio then?

DG: So Rapt Studio was kind of a re-imagining of an interior design firm that I had taken a position at, became the president and then retired the founder. And I think at the time I was looking around reoccurring themes of my life. Looking at the boundaries, we did mostly workplace, which I thought was really interesting work, but I also knew that there was an expansion in my mind of how you could… You know, the limitations, we were constantly bumping up against the wall of, well, we’re going to take that to our web designer. We’re going to talk to our HR department to go talk to a consultant about developing rituals and talking about behaviors and for me, it was all woven together.

I mean, the blanket of human experiences covers a lot of these kind of defined barriers between how I operate at work, and the tools that I need, et cetera. So I started Rapt Studio really with the idea that we should just collect a bunch of really curious, really smart, really creative people to solve interesting, complex challenges. I saw that most of my clients were dealing with these things that defied definition, they didn’t sit comfortably in one arena or the other. So we started Rapt and it has morphed over the last 10 years into really an interdisciplinary studio that has strategists and interior designers, architects, but also industrial designers, graphic designers, folks interested in really asking questions about how people interact with each other and how you can build spaces, sometimes digital, sometimes physical to support those interactions.

SSR: Yeah. Before we got on this call, I was looking at your website and I just love… It’s very simple, but you write, “We create emotionally compelling, relevant, authentic brands and the experiences that bring them to life.” And then you say, “We ask why, lots of why’s. We don’t design things, we create experiences that move brands forward. We tell your truth, we don’t come in pretending to have all the answers. We’re as much students as experts.” I love that you ask these questions that you try to really bring what they want to the forefront, but that’s a lot of collaboration, right? That’s a lot of the back and forth.

DG: Yeah. It used to be not too many years ago that clients were looking for a depth of experience and a particular kind of project that you had to have drawers of projects in retail or hospitality to be able to prove your merit and your ability to design something. And I think in very quick order, and certainly the last couple of years have accelerated people rethinking the worlds that we live. But we’re seeing more clients willing to take a leap to understand that if we’re going to challenge ourselves, and if we’re going to solve new kinds of problems, it can’t be solved with the old solutions.

DG:You can’t just pull something out of a drawer and say, “Okay, we’ve done that before. Here, what color would you like this one?” That doesn’t fly. And so what we’re seeing is kind of a breakdown of the barriers between these projects, and just understanding that if you’re a group that really cares about defining the ways people want to come together and interact and designing systems of belonging that make people feel like they’re a part of something larger than themselves, then that can be applied to multitude of different kinds of projects.

SSR: Yeah. A hundred percent. And you’ve worked with some, I mean, amazing people; Google, Goop, PayPal, DoorDash. I mean, all these brands that are reinventing their own space. So you get to reinvent space for them to continue to do their creative work. I mean, that must be awesome. Is fair a lack of better term?

DG: Yeah. And it’s kind of a luxury of when you work with clients that are really redefining the way people interact with their surroundings. When you work with a client like Goop or Google that really truly care about bringing people a new understanding of the world, and thinking of new ways to interact with it, you can’t just bring the joyful of designs to the table, you have to meet their challenge to rethink and reimagine and that’s what’s been so incredible about working with those folks.

SSR: Is there one project you think kind of really… I mean, I know it’s hard to pick a favorite project, but is there one project you think that either was the most challenging or really kind of your choice, either the most challenging or one that you think defines what you all do at Rapt really well and why?

DG: Yeah.

SSR: I mean, they’re all…

DG: It’s like who’s your favorite child.

SSR: Yeah, I know. I can tell you who that is this week though. I’m very, very vocal about that.

DG: Oh, okay. There it is. We pride ourselves and have been lucky enough to have kind of an array of clients challenging the world in different ways. And we also are engaging in projects in new and different ways. A lot of the work that we’re doing is in collaboration with other design firms and really bringing together more of a kind of a team environment to get the best ideas at the table. I’ll throw out a couple of examples of work that has been challenging but in a really interesting way. We did the design working with James Corner of Field Operations who’s an incredible landscape architect, did the st in New York. We did a project in San Pedro, which is the waterfront in Los Angeles, so working waterfront.

DG: And the client came to us and said, “There’s an existing series of shops that have been here and kind of grown old, and we want to re-energize the waterfront for a new generation of people to enjoy. We want it to be authentic. We want it not just to be another mall on the water. How can we develop a place where people can really come and make it their own?” It’s called West Harbor in Los Angeles. We kind of worked very hard to look at what that place could be, and worked with the owners to not just design a space that talks about ground playing and the mix of program, but also talks about how you curate a retail and food and beverage so that it’s an interesting place that doesn’t feel like every other place. It really came down to how you make that particular place unique and of the moment, so that when you get there it just doesn’t feel like a… Well, we could have gone to three other places and not in the same thing.

DG: That was really interesting. It took into account planning and architecture, but also retail and hospitality in a way that talks about community building. Like we’re doing work for Warner Media in Atlanta right now which is a consolidation project, but really looking at a campus that was designed 25 years ago for an organization that did broadcast 25 years ago. The world of media has changed drastically. The world of workplace has changed drastically. The way we show up to campuses now have changed drastically. Defining what the new work mode, why people go, and how they show up, and what kinds of amenities and interactions they’ll have moving forward has been unbelievably challenging but really rewarding as well. And again, it’s not just, “Hey, I know a lot about workplace furniture, so therefore I’m an expert.” This is how can you really get to the heart of how people are going to show up to work moving forward, and what the idea of campus even is.

SSR: Yeah. I mean, now that you bring that up, I mean, what are you? You guys are so invested in workplace and a lot of your work is that, so how are you rethinking it moving forward after the last two years that we’ve gone through? What are your thoughts on going back to work?

DG: Yeah. I had a friend the other day that I was talking about going back to work and they were like, “Can we please stop saying going back to work, I’ve been working the whole time. I need someone to tell me how I go back to my social life.”

SSR: It’s a very good point. We have not stopped working, but we just stopped going into the physical office.

DG: Exactly.

SSR: How do we get back into the physical office?

DG: For us, I keep telling people that there’s no better time to be a designer than now. There’s so much opportunity to really rethink what we know about everything. And the first thing for me is to understand that work… One thing we learned over the last two years, work happens in a multitude of places, so workplace now becomes just one tool in the toolbox. I’m a carpenter. In the past, I had a toolbox that had a hammer in it. And I pounded a lot of things, but now I understand that I need a wrench and I need a screwdriver and I need et cetera, et cetera. I can do certain things at home in my home office really well. I can do certain things in the workplace, in the office really well, and I have a need for both of those things.

I now stand because those two things are available to me, that I can leverage the best of both. And on the days that I can stay home and be productive, boy, I’d just financed that day with the two hours of commute and I just got back from myself. And by the way, I can pick the kids up from school, I can have lunch with my husband, so those kinds of things are all wins. So the first thing we’re pushing is let’s not just go back and say, “Well, how do we get people back to the office?” Because that’s one piece of it. Certainly there is certainly a huge draw to workplace and we see it across our clients. People miss coming together, people miss the kind of connection you can make that isn’t flattened by the computer screen. People are yearning for those kinds of things. Well, if that’s what the workplace gives me and home gives me something, then there’s the third place.

I can work in a hotel room or a coffee shop or in a park, which leads you to thinking about, well, how do we design hotel rooms to better offer me a work environment? In 2019, I flew 430,000 miles in 2019. I was never in my office. I can tell you, I did a lot of really cramped work at bad hotel desks that had a 55 inch screen, 16 inches from my head with the chair stuck between the bed and the… So workplace has now become, how do we support people working in a multitude of places? It’s no longer just in an office, it’s really how do we give the tools? How do we support my employees with wellbeing, with the tools they need from a spatial perspective, with the technology they need to connect? It’s a really great time to have that conversation and be a designer and be allowed the privilege of coming in and helping people figure it all out.

SSR: Right. Are you able to experiment with anything with your three offices? I mean, do you guys kind of play around with ideas that you have?

DG: Yeah. We took our offices and again, I didn’t want people to come back to anything. We’re not going back, we’re moving forward. We did kind of an assessment of what the studio means for our staff and spent a lot of time talking with our employees and tried to understand why they would want to come back and when they didn’t feel like they needed to. We moved our New York office recently and we moved in into a storefront in Brooklyn. The idea there is it’s really a gathering place. And did it in a storefront because one of the other things that we’re really interested in is as retail starts to change its hold on urban storefronts and on streets, how do you reenergize neighborhoods? How do you make up for the hole that’s being left? And that was pre-COVID that that was happening.

DG: So we took a storefront space that’s part studio and part meeting place, part gallery, part community center, and we’re really engaging with the community in ways that offer them a place to come in and kind of meet us. In our Los Angeles studio, we basically ripped it all out. We tore out a lot of what was kind of plot rooms and those kinds of things. We made a big kitchen. It’s really a retreat center now in LA more than anything. Folks not wanting to work through the commute of getting to the studio are looking forward to the couple of days a week they may come in, gather with the team and meet with clients, and really have those kind of interactions they can’t have when they’re working remotely. So it’s been a good time to experiment with those things. We’re doing projects with clients too, where we’re building out more labs. Most of our smarter clients know that they can’t figure out what the future holds, so let’s use this time to experiment a little bit.

SSR: And I love I was looking on some of the stuff on your website and one of the post-pandemic workforce first approach, which is a mouthful, to going back to the workplace just FYI. But I love that you touched on some of them, like creativity, inspiring teamwork, a different perspective, and then also that personal growth, right? Like how can you create a space that’s teamwork and collaborative, but also something for them personally, as you said, that holistic wellness, right? It’s just not about the… You have to think as a team, but also as an individual.

DG: Yeah, it’s interesting because we’ve been talking for a long time about workplace design in a way that focuses on the individual. I’m a firm believer that if companies work to allow a person to be themselves, to bring the best of who they are, then teams are better. You know, better individuals create better teams.

SSR: Yeah.

DG: It’s a hard balance to get what is good for someone, what’s good for the team, what’s good for the organization. That’s a constant kind of… It’s a fluid equation, if you will.

But I do think we need to think about how we support the workforce first and then workplace will come. It was a very long time… It’s been 10 years that we’ve been talking about workplace being affected by hospitality design and residential design and bringing that comfort into the workplace, pushing on amenities and food service, and really bringing all of the comforts of home and a spa to the workplace. What the last two years have done is said, “Well, is that necessary? Or can I get that at home now? Can I get…”

The CEO of Airbnb has just posted that he’s going to spend the next year moving from place to place. That the nature of travel is shifting, that it if you’re someone who’s signing a year lease in San Francisco and you can work remotely, why wouldn’t you do four Airbnb stents for three months at a time and be able to live and work remotely from Austin for three months, and then Atlanta, and then Nashville? So the nature of how we think about the support of individuals is changing. The workplace is one part of that, but we’re no longer looking to the workplace to provide every single thing someone needs to be happy. It’s going to be that kind of negotiation on what that is for individuals, what it is for teams, that’s going to really define the design of workplace and the design of every other space moving forward.

If you can work anywhere, then really workplace is designing everything.

SSR: Exactly. It’s an interesting shift. The pandemic definitely accelerated that. That was already starting to shift a bit, so. Speaking back to that hotel room conversation, because I do think for a while all the attention was in… I mean, this is a very, very big generalization, but that a lot of the focus was on the lobby. Right? And the guest rooms in many instances became have to have with the right things instead of a place where people can… I mean, in certain tiers obviously luxury’s a different tier, but the guest room became kind of not as important, in my opinion, as a lobby in many classes of hotels.

But that being said, if you had to… And I’ll probably get yelled at for that by somebody but that’s fine. If you had to rethink a guest room, what would you do? How would you reinterpret it? Would you make it almost obviously keeping square footage in mind and everything? Is it as simple as just bringing a nice desk back? Or is it just briefing me how people use this space in general, if there is a very big lobby that has options down there to work in as well?

DG: Yeah. If you track the design of hotels, for a very long time you’d get a bit of a desk in a room, but it was kind of okay, we we need a desk with a chair. No one really expected to work there for any length of time. There were business centers that usually were relegated to the worst area of the hotel like you might get a computer with Windows 4 on it, and a bad printer that may or may not work.

SSR: And the dial up sound like the…

DG: Yeah, exactly. And then hotel design really started to push this idea of work but in a way that the lobbies became places for people to meet, for those interactions to happen in a way that felt good, and it was exciting and you could be in a different place and it really became… We learned more from hotel lobbies than we did from co-working spaces, really. I mean, that kind of push… You know, the Ace Hotel in New York, I used to go there and that’s where I would camp out in the lobby and the room would be to sleep in.

I think after the last couple of years and our understanding of how we’ll work moving forward and I think the comfort with working remotely, I think a hotel room needs to be rethought. There have been a set of rules, and I also don’t want to insult anyone designing hotels, but there’s been a set of rules that we’ve followed for a long time and I think we need to rethink that and really think about if I travel for business, there is a chance that I may use the room in a different way than I have in the past. If I travel for leisure, because I know I can work remotely while I travel for leisure, then that room is going to be used a little differently than it has in the past.

And I think we need a new set of rules. We need the same kind of asking why about the design of hotel rooms. I’ve got a whole slew of reasons why we should be asking questions. And there’s the kit-of-parts, there’s a lounge chair and an Ottoman and a side table with a light that I’m probably not going to sit in, but it takes a lot of room. So really looking at how people… what the tools are when I travel that I might need to connect remotely, and I think a whole new slew of solutions will be forthcoming. And again, we’ll probably learn about workplace through incredible designs that come out of hospitality. There are less boundaries between things. It’s becoming a coffee shop/coworking space, it’s becoming a hotel/remote work environment,

SSR: Right. Slash, slash, slash. I mean, I think that’s-

DG: Slash, slash, slash.

SSR: That’s been the most exciting thing to see over the last, call it, five years that how much hospitality has had an effect on other spaces and vice versa. It’s always in just how much more fluid it is and how much people are taking from each other to constantly improve and evolve which makes a lot of sense. Have you had one hospitality experience that kind of sticks with you? Either one stay or one dinner or…

DG: I’ve had lots of hospitality experiences.

SSR: There are a couple.

DG: Yeah. I mean, there are the obvious like staying in [Amangiri 00:33:00] in Arizona, and just crazy beautiful-

SSR: A dream.

DG:… in the middle of red-rock spectacular… You know? I think the design of those rooms being a picture frame for the most beautiful vista. The idea that you can arrive and people know who you are and what you did that day without ever giving anybody a key or a room number, that level of care and attention really is something amazing. For me, it all comes down to… And that’s a very high-end experience, but it all comes down to how can we start to design experiences that make people feel cared for and not just shuffled through. And that doesn’t have to be high end to do, it just takes a little bit of care and finesse. I’m trying to think of an incredible aspect-

SSR: That’s perfect. I mean, Amangiri is right out there. It’s a dream spot for many including myself, so.

DG: Yeah.

SSR: Tell us about the Rapt Studio today. Three offices, you talked a little bit about rethinking the offices. How are you as a leader… How’s the last two years changed for you and how do you see the company kind of evolving or the culture of it evolving as you move forward?

DG: Yeah, the last couple of years as a leader have been difficult. I mean, they just have. Anyone who tells you it hasn’t is just lying.

SSR: Lying. They’re 100 percent lying.

DG: It’s a balance, and the last two years have been hard from the pandemic perspective, but also challenging from the perspective of social justice and learning about one’s selves and how… I’ll speak for myself, there was a lot of learning moments over the last two years for me as an individual, a white man, and coming to grips with what white privilege really means. That gets more complicated when you have a staff of 50 people to be a leader too, and how you show up to that conversation and how you allow the conversation to happen without leading in some ways.

And I think for me the most challenging part of the last couple of years has been to know when to lead and when to just let things flow. To let people figure out how they want to interact at work, how they want to have a conversation about things and not try to put policy around everything, not try to put words to everything. Sometimes it’s okay as a leader, sometimes it’s necessary as a leader just to listen and leave room for things to take hold. That was something I was kind of good at before. I believe that we hire really talented adults and we should let them figure out how they can be their best person. We have unlimited PTO because I don’t want to tell people what they need and when they need to do it, it’s just…

You have a responsibility of the client, you have a responsibility of the work, you have a responsibility of the team, the last thing you should have responsibilities too is some policy manual. That’s just the last thing I want to rely on. So I think for me, it’s been really a great time to step back and learn about how to lead in times of real challenge. I’ve learned a lot from folks, I’ve learned a lot from our clients. I still don’t know what it looks like when we open our studios officially to people coming back. We’ve talked at length about what we think is important to us, and I think to the creative process and to teams bringing their best work, it’s important to be in person and to collaborate in that way. What frequency that happens, I have no idea. I’m going to let people figure that out.

SSR: Oh, I’m sure that will differ between California and New York, just figuring out what makes sense for each office.

DG: Yeah, absolutely. The other thing that I’ve learned is to… We had three studios in three distinct locations, all of them serve of clients across the globe, so from a kind of geography perspective really those three studios exist to hire people that want to live in those places. We’ve really learned and we’ve always been very good at remote working because we have work happening in various time zones across the world. But I think over the last two years, we really have gotten much better at doing teams across studios and really bringing the best talent to bear and allowing people to work with people they don’t usually work with. And that has been an incredible win. I think people feel really energized by that, and it’s been great.

SSR: Yeah. No, that’s awesome. Was there one project that you looked back and you say that was kind of your big break or really put Rapt Studio on the map? Because you have worked with some amazing clients, so was there one that kind of elevated the work that you were doing in a way that kind of got you more attention than you had in the past?

DG: Yeah. I mean, I think it was… I wouldn’t say there was a kind of big break project. I think there are a number of things we kind of gradually kind of got more and more recognition. I think if there was one, I would probably put it on the Adobe Campus in Utah. It was a project for an incredible client who really understood that they weren’t just building another office, but in fact, they could really redefine what it meant to build a space to how it was really creative people. And to tell the story of a company that basically fuels so much creativity in the world and allowed us to really take some chances in how we told their story was…

And we got some reasonable recognition from that project, but it also for me was on a big scale kind of proof of concept for what we were doing. That we were as much storytellers as we were as architects. That we were telling our clients’ story in a way that had to trump all, and that there was no fingerprints… There was no Rapt fingerprints on that project we left, and it was Adobe through and through. For me that was really a project that was kind of a meaningful moment in saying, “Okay, yeah. This is working.”

SSR: Yeah. And I mean, I think that’s hard to… Well, not hard but I think it’s a beauty of your all work that you really lean into the brand to the client that you can see threads of Rapt, right? Like the thoughtfulness, but you don’t know for sure that it could be one of your projects.

DG: Yeah.

SSR: Which is easier said than done, so.

DG: It’s easier said than done. When we interview for folks, it’s really what we’re looking for is this kind of drive, the curiosity in people. Because it’s very easy not to design things in the same way, but to maybe answer questions in the same way. And so it might not look the same, but the solutions start to be kind of systematic. I’m a firm believer that if it ain’t broke, break it anyway, because chances are it’s getting stagnant. So my staff is used to me just throwing bombs in the room and running and just seeing what happens, because I think you need to shake it up, you need to make sure you’re asking questions in a different manner.

It’s why we have a blend of individuals on our staff. It’s because someone who comes from the world of strategy from consumer insights from… They ask question differently than designers do, they process information differently than designers do. So putting a strategist and an interior designer and a graphic designer in a room together to ask the same questions and prod and push and analyze answers really is powerful. You get different points of view, you get a much better… It’s a much better solution than it would’ve been had any one of those individuals come up with by themselves.

SSR: Yeah. And it’s great though, that you encourage those questions, right? Encourage people to think outside the box and kind of break the boundaries like you said.

DG: Yeah.

SSR: So tell us more a little bit about you. Is there one thing people might not know about you?

DG: Oh boy, I’m an open book. Probably not. If there’s one thing that surprises people and it kind of goes into what makes me think and operate the way I do is… You know, when I was 21 I was diagnosed with leukemia. Two years later, I had a bone marrow transplant. I had one brother, he was a perfect match. Five years after that, I was you deemed cured and never looked back.

And I don’t think about that, I don’t talk about it ever, but I think at 21 when you’re faced with mortality, it kind of seeps into your being in a way that you don’t really worry about the small things and you try to find… You know, I always say what we do is we build connections. It might be spatially, it might be digitally, it be emotionally, we are in the practice of just finding those connective tissues and exploiting them, bringing people together and really… The word community is overused, but building community and making people feel seen and heard. And I think that definitely came from just a time in my life when I was asked to think about something larger than myself.

SSR: Yeah, a very young age.

DG: Yeah.

SSR: Yeah. That’s neat. Well, I’m glad he was a match. Do you have one kind of way that you keep inspired and keep having that impulse to think differently and think outside the box? Is there anything that kind of keeps you going?

DG: Yeah, I travel all the time for pleasure, for work. I never turn down an opportunity to go somewhere else. I am curious to a fault. That’s just who I am and who I’ve always been. I read a lot and I’m never happy doing the same thing twice. It’s just kind of who I am. So I get bored easily if something seems like it’s routine, which has been difficult over the last two years, by the way, speaking of routine. But that just allows me to constantly… I’m like a three year old who’s never grown up who’s constantly… You know that part where you’re trying to watch TV and you’re like, “Why? Why is he doing that? Why is he…” That’s me. So probably not great to be around sometimes, but that has kept me inspired and infused me with enough energy to keep this thing going.

SSR: Got it. Do you like your dad tinker in your own house? Are you always remodeling?

DG: Yes.

SSR: Yes?

DG: Yes. Yeah.

SSR: So you’re in Sonoma, you said?

DG: Yes. Yeah, I’m in Sonoma.

SSR: Anything you’re renovating right now?

DG: We’re kind of between, we just finished a couple of bathrooms, kind of in between renovation. The great thing about the last two years and being at home is we were able to do all of the things that you never quite get to like, “Oh, that screw drives me crazy. Oh, that door sticks. Oh, we really should change out those few, you know?” So we’re buttoning things up there. There are a couple of projects on the horizon mostly outside, kind of outdoor kitchen-y kinds of things. But yeah, we’re in between things at the moment

SSR: Yeah. Does your style at home reflect your work at Rapt or is it completely different? I always wonder.

DG: Yeah, I’d say so. And in as much as my style is another word I dislike eclectic. But you know my style it doesn’t follow any rules. Surprise. If I were to walk you through my home, it’s a story of my life. There are things that I’ve collected on journeys and found objects and it tells a story. It makes me feel comfortable that it all adds up to something at the end of the day. I haven’t gone to a home store and said, “I want that room, just move it over here.” You know, that’s how we look at our projects and it’s interesting because a lot of projects have taken on this kind of hotel lobby feel where you can curate shelves with things.

DG: And a lot of that to me has become as though it’s the curated shelf design, you know? So when we do that with clients, we push them to have staff bring things that mean something to them. To build it over time, to not have it finished when leave but in fact, have it be the vessel for their storytelling moving forward. We think that’s really important. A space should live and grow as you as an individual grows or as a company grows. It should have room for the individual to make their place.

SSR: Yeah. I love that. Is there one place on your bucket list still to travel to? I know you say you travel a lot, but.

DG: I’ve been to Tokyo on business a couple of times, but really both times have been kind of in and out, you know pay attention to client and go. I would like to spend more time in Japan just kind of wandering.

SSR: Yeah. That’d be beautiful.

DG: Yeah. I have kind of a default of like flying to Spain or Italy because food and culture, and it’s kind of an easy thing to do, so every once in a while I have to force myself to kind of venture.

SSR: Yeah. I understand. We’re all creatures of habit at some point. Okay. So we always end this podcast with the title of the podcast. What has been your greatest lesson or lessons learned along the way?

DG: Yeah, so I’d say my greatest lesson certainly over the last two years but really just kind of culminating to where I am today, is don’t ever get to a point where you think everything you know adds up to something other than how much you are yet to learn. And I think as a leader, as a designer, as a husband, as a friend, I constantly strive to just keep listening and asking why, and to understand that I’ve got more to learn than I have in the hopper. I think that’s the lesson I just keep learning.

SSR: Yep. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. It was such a pleasure to catch up and hopefully I’ll see you in real life at some point and soon, sooner rather than-

DG: Yeah. Looking forward to it. Thank you.

SSR: Yeah, I really appreciate it. Have a great day. Thanks so much, David.