Alon Baranowitz and Irene Kronenberg, Baranowitz + Kronenberg

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, I’m here with Irene and Alon. How are you guys? Thanks so much for being here today.

Alon Baranowitz: Thank you for reaching out for us.

Irene Kronenberg: Hi, it’s great to talk with you again.

SSR: I know, it’s so good to see you. Well, hear you. How have you been doing? The last three months have been challenging, to say the least. How has it been? Where are you guys surviving COVID, and how is your firm doing?

IK: Our last flight was on the 24th of February, and we cannot believe we have been grounded for four months. At the beginning it was quite nice, I must say, this slow living. But right now, we feel that it’s about time to start to move, and hopefully we will be able to do so early.

SSR: Yeah. Have projects slowed down?

AB: Well, I think we are lucky to have projects that are being built as we speak. Anything that is under construction just continued, because they cannot stop it for the obvious reasons. And all the rest of the projects are in the really early stages, so people take the time to reflect and rethink schemes, and all kinds of issues that come up with our design. So basically we are very busy, I must say. We are lucky to be that busy. Together with slow living that we’ve been practicing for the last three or four months, we’ve enjoyed it I’d say.

IK: I think that it was a great opportunity to work a lot in between ourselves to pause and reflect, to develop concepts, to think about the direction we should take, what is the direction of hospitality—the new direction of hospitality. I think that in this minute there were very interesting times, isn’t it?

AB: Actually, yeah. We didn’t want this crisis to go to waste. We wanted to profit out of it and come stronger and wiser and knowing better where to go. I think we’re in a good shape now. We are ready to roll, but the world is still lingering, unfortunately.

SSR: Yeah. Where have you been? Are you at home?

AB: Yeah, we were locked down at our apartment in Tel Aviv, and we came to understand why we love it so much, because we traveled the world and the seven seas for so much, so we finally had the time to enjoy our apartment, which usually feels like a terminal that you plug in and you plug out. It’s a vicious cycle of traveling. So now we had the time to enjoy it. Our beautiful terrace, we sit on the terrace all day working.

IK: The weather is amazing.

AB: Yeah. Mediterranean, so what more can you ask for?

IK: But we are already in the office for the last I think four weeks at least, with our team. Most of them are with us here in the office now.

AB: Yeah. They had the liberty to choose how they want to work, because where I used to work remotely, it’s been modus operandi for us for the last five years. Some stayed at home, some came to the office. Yeah, it was really nice to see a different kind of mode of work and operations on a daily basis, which also makes you think about why do we have to travel so much if we can solve everything by Zoom almost?

SSR: Yeah. I think people will start to question jumping on a plane for that 24-hour meeting.

AB: No, absolutely. I really see no need. We have been, not only with our clients abroad, we’ve been Zooming for the last two months. But also we’ve practiced it with local engineers and consultants, and people that we need to have a meeting with them, we changed to Zoom mode. We don’t leave the office, it’s a waste of time. And everybody’s happy. You don’t need to be stuck in traffic for two hours and waste such precious time.

IK: But to use this mode with clients and with consultants was something that it was quite difficult to convince them that it works. I can tell you that we are developing in this, each day something is different. I can tell you, Stacy, that until one week ago, we said it’s amazing to do this kind of communication by Zoom, Skype, or whatever, for things that are very technical, and to pass information from one side to another.

AB: And coordination.

IK: And coordination. But when you have a meeting that you need to do a presentation, a conceptual presentation, it doesn’t work. Today, I can tell you that it works as well, because we’ve had a few. And I was so firm in this, that you cannot do a presentation by Zoom, and we had a few. And actually the first one wasn’t so good, but yesterday we had one and it was amazing. So, we are pros on that, how to communicate with people when really you cannot touch them, you cannot see them very close to you, but you see them. And this is an important one. And I think that, yes, this kind of media will develop to give more intimacy to the conversations.

AB: Yeah, but that said, human touch will prevail. We need that. This is the kind of species we are. We need this warmth, human warmth. We need to be close to each other. We want to feel each other. We want to touch each other. We need to be close to each other. This is how we are. Yeah, there is technology, but up to a certain place, up to a certain moment. So I think it’s a different mix of how much of Zoom and how much of human touch, but human touch will prevail for sure. This is us. This is who we are.

SSR: How has it been opening up in Tel Aviv? Have people been coming back out?

AB: The beaches are back. The beaches are back. We are relentless, really. It’s like carpe diem, seize the day. That’s how we live in Tel Aviv. And yeah, unfortunately, most of us, we think corona is something of the past. This is how we live our life today. It has its toll. It’s crazy, it’s really crazy. But this is who we are. We are from the Mediterranean. That’s the culture.

SSR: We’re social people.

AB: Yes.

SSR: So, let’s get into a little bit of your background, and how you two came to be where you are today. Growing up, where did you both grow up, and did you always know you wanted to be a designer, or have an early love of design or architecture?

IK: A little bit about my background. Actually, I’m South American, I don’t know if you noticed by my accent. It’s obvious, it’s obvious. I was born in Uruguay. During the bad times of South America with the dictatorship, we moved with my family to Madrid. I stayed there for a couple of years, and then I moved to Tel Aviv. When I decided I wanted to become a designer—actually, I wanted to be so many things at the beginning—it was quite complicated. But at the end, I made the decision. I started to study history of art actually, because of my love of art and my needs of intellectual work. At the same time, I went to a different university to study interior design. I was in the Tel Aviv University studying history of art and Technion Architecture School studying interior design. After two years, I decided that I wanted to keep doing and thinking—not arts—but doing something that I can do it by myself, see the results, creating things by myself without leaving my artistic approach.

SSR: Did your parents influence you at all about design, or anything growing up?

IK: My parents are not alive anymore, but they were divorced. I grew up with my mother and my stepfather. They were artists, both of them. He was an architect that became a very well-known theater actor, and my mother was an actress as well. So, art, theater, and music, they were a part of my life. My stepbrother and sister, both of them are dancers, living in an artistic environment was part of my life.

SSR: Sounds amazing.

AB: Yeah. Mine is a little bit more down to earth.

SSR: Go for it.

AB: My family comes from the real estate business, so every dinner, lunch, there was always talk about business, architects, designers, and schemes. So I was listening carefully, and I remember that my father used to take me a lot to the construction sites to teach me, and I used to spend a lot of time there. In the holidays after school I was working in building sites, and learned the trades of so many people because I did it for 10 years. And I remember myself always with a pencil and a piece of paper drawing and doodling. I was looking to create something. And I think when I was 16, I remember that I had a dream that I became an architect, or something like that. And it made sense when I woke up. After graduating from the army, I went to New York and I studied architecture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. So, I lived in New York for five years, and then I came back. And my family said, why don’t you design our projects, our buildings, our neighborhoods, whatever we do. So, I said, why not.

SSR: Sounds good.

AB: Yeah, sounds good, sounds like a plan. And that’s what I did. This is how I became involved in architecture and design.

SSR: Wonderful. And where did you two meet?

AB: Actually, I had an office in the southern part of Tel Aviv, it’s called Florentin. It’s a beautiful neighborhood …

IK: Interesting, not beautiful. Interesting.

AB: It’s beautiful because of the people.

IK: Well yeah, because of the people.

AB: That came in the ‘40s and immigrated to Israel during the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s from Eastern Europe and the Balkans. It’s a very dynamic neighborhood. I rented my office over there in the building, and one day Irene knocked on the door.

IK: The neighborhood was a very bohemian neighborhood where you had a lot of young people, artists, also workshops of carpenters, steelworkers …

AB: Glassworkers.

IK: Yeah. So it was very interesting. But at that time, I was more into residential, interior design of residential. So I was a little bit afraid that maybe this is going to be a little bit edgy for my clientele. They told me, listen, there is an architect in the second floor, so ask him. So I knock in the door.

AB: And the rest is history.

SSR: Love it.

AB: Yeah, eventually she rented the office above my floor. I never did interior design projects, and once I got one. And I said, what should I do? And, I thought, well, Irene is upstairs, she’s doing interior design. Why don’t I ask her to maybe join me and teach me? And so we started collaborating on projects, and this is really where history began.

SSR: So, did you start working on his projects, and vice versa? Did you just start to collaborate? And then when did you decide to officially come together and launch your namesake firm?

IK: It took time, because I had my own firm and Alon has his own. And we were partners, and we became very good friends, and then we became a couple. But still, each one kept their own space and office. And then at a certain point it starts to become a little bit ridiculous, because all the projects were together. And we said, okay, we need to do this move. But it took a few years until I was ready to do a full partnership, also in life and also in business because it’s something that you need to really engineer. It’s not something that is easy to do where you put up borders and need to define what are the borders are of each one. It is very difficult to come in every single case to come to a complete understanding. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we don’t agree. And you cannot be in an endless discussion, convincing each other what is the way to go. This is not the way. So, our way was to actually define who is going to be the boss where.

SSR: Is that why you two work so well together? You both have different strengths?

AB: Well, first of all we always say that one and one should equal 11, otherwise it doesn’t make any sense, and I think that Irene and I are really 11, because she has her own strengths, she’s such a clever psychologist, and she has this bird’s eye view on everything. She sees the big picture all the time. She moves the office always in the right direction, and we follow her. She has the very deep understanding of what is a human experience, how people feel, how people react. She can foresee things before they happen in such an amazing way. And I’m into the details. I’m into construction, I’m into developing concepts. So, each one of us has different fortes, which is great. And then we just need to decide who takes the lead where. And it took a lot of time to find it. It’s not easy, especially when you are a couple. You don’t have this button of switch on, switch off. This is where I’m a husband, this is where I’m a wife, this is where I’m a designer, this is where I’m a partner. It’s all together. It’s one big mush.

SSR: One big happy family.

AB: Yes, exactly. And it works. And it works.

SSR: What year did you actually launch the firm?

AB: 2000 I think, no?

SSR: Okay, so 20 years. What would you consider your big break that put you on the map, or that you really thought, okay, we can do this?

IK: Listen, I think that the important projects are those that change your point of view, your way of thinking, your way of acting. It doesn’t matter if they are small or big, so I can give you two examples. One is a restaurant that we did. When it was, Alon, do you remember?

AB: 1999.

IK: 1999, yes. It was an Asian eatery. And it was there, we really started to think about designing a different way. We leave aside the functionality and try to build the DNA and to understand the forces that lead the concept of the space and of this restaurant. This is something that until now, it was so many years ago, we can remember exactly where it was, at what time, where do we seat in the meeting room, what was the conversation. We took the time to think about the project without any trace on the paper to understand, investigate, and do a lot of research, trying to find the DNA of the project. I think that this way of working is something that from that moment until today, this is the way we work. So this was really a big break for us, from working in functionality and style, to work on something that’s very deep and contextual, and narrative driven, and this was in 1999.

AB: And also, I think we developed a very clear vision of how a project should be experienced, in a very open-ended way. We learned to abstract our spaces in such a way that whenever you enter them, they feel fresh, and they have something new to tell you, or something new that you find in them. And whenever you come back, you read it differently, although it didn’t change. Like this book of the Little Prince, for example, which is a wonderful book. You read it when you are 7 years old, and then you read it when you are 16, then 20, and then 40, and so on. It’s still relevant. Nothing changed in the book. It’s you that changed. And I think you can create spaces like that. They are still relevant for you in any age that you enter them, and you are still inspired by them regardless of your age, then there’s something really special there. These are really wonderful projects. This is the kind of mindset and this is the kind of design that we are looking for when we do our projects.

SSR: I love that. How do you approach each project? Talk to us about your firm and how you run it, and how involved are the two of you still as the leaders of the firm?

AB: Okay, I will start with the end. Both of us are people that love to be involved. This is our passion. We are not afraid of rolling the sleeves and putting our hands in the mud. And I think that this is why we have decided many years ago, I think even before we collaborated as one office. We said we don’t want a big office. We want to be 12, 15 people, and be able to know everything about what we do, control anything that we are doing and be part of it and enjoy to the full. Hence, we are more creators, we are more into the artistic realm of what we do. Although management and economics is very important, because the business of business is business at the end of the day. But this is how we want it. We want to feel the pulse of anything that we do.

So in order to do that, we didn’t want to be a sweat shop, we didn’t want to be an office of 100 people. And we said, if we want to make really big projects and we need more power for that, then we will collaborate with people all around the world that we know, and we bring them over to work together with us. So we have people in Canada, we have people in Kiev, we have people in Madrid. If the project demands more capacity of power, of production, so we use it. All the brainstorming, like Irene said, finding the DNA, understanding the context, developing the project, this is all done here in-house.

IK: Yeah, and the coordination of projects, because at the end of the day, you need to really take care that the big ideas they don’t dilute during the construction and during the development of the detail design. This is something that is very important. That’s why the coordination, it’s so important to keep it very close to your heart.

AB: I can really say that what we do is made to measure. We hand stitch every project. Once a client told us, you know why I keep returning to your office? Besides that I love you, okay? Because I don’t know what I’m going to get, but I know it’s going to be fabulous. And I think this is us in a nutshell. Each project that comes along, we don’t know how it’s going. And people ask, what do you think? How should it look? How it’s going to look? Tell me about it, what do you see? We don’t see anything. He says, what do you mean? No, we don’t see anything. We need to do our homework. We need to study. We need to do the research. We need to find what is the context, why is the context, why is the project, what do you want to achieve?

There are so many members in the formula that we don’t even know anything about them. So once we learn it, then we can start understanding where do we want to go. And each time, it’s the context, and the brief of the client, which is totally different each time, that makes us follow a different route. And Irene and I are both people that move from the safe zone on a daily basis. We cannot stay in the same place for more than a project. So we keep moving, we keep looking.

IK: Asking questions.

SSR: And speaking of clients that come back to you, you’ve done a lot with Liran Wizman from Sircle Hotels for the Sir brand. Can you talk a little bit about that relationship? He has described you as family, which I think speaks so amazingly for how you two work with people. What’s the secret to your success with him? How did you collaborate, and how are you involved in helping him to imagine that brand?

IK: Sometimes it’s about being in the right place at the right time, and we think the right people. And I think something that happened to Liran he met us, and happened to us when we met him, because at that time he had a few orders in Europe, but he wasn’t in the lifestyle segment at all. And we did a lot of restaurants at that time, and not a lot of hotels. The hotels that we did were more like chains, not lifestyle, more business hotels. And then he gave us the opportunity to design for him a restaurant in Amsterdam. And he had complete confidence and let us do what we thought should be done. And it became the most famous and successful restaurant in Amsterdam.

AB: Still today, right?

IK: Still today. It’s Momo. And this is the way we start. We have to grow on each other, actually. And we did this way, this journey together.

AB: So, after Momo, we did Sir Albert.

IK: We asked can he come to us. And he said, listen guys, I would like to develop a brand, and we developed together the Sir Hotel brands. It was really fun. The first one was Sir Albert in the Pijp in Amsterdam. And it was very clear that each hotel should have his own personality. And it was very clear that this is not a brand that can be designed only by one firm, although we did a few. But we didn’t do all of them, and this is good. But still, we are talking and supporting Liran in each one of them.

AB: Like you mentioned, it’s really feeling like a family. And any hurdle, any problem, any doubt that he has, he picks up the phone and says, hey guys, how are you? Listen, can you help me out here? I’m looking for how to solve it or what do you think about it. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a project that we are involved in, or other architects are involved in. He feels confident, and he seeks for our shoulder wherever he feels that it’s a little bit beyond him and he needs to consult. Because he knows that he will always hear the truth from us. This is, I think, what he really respects and appreciates about us, that we tell him hard things, and we tell him good things, but we tell him the truth. And I think that Liran is a person that is not afraid of listening to the truth, even if it’s not very comfortable sometimes. And I think this is the strength of our relationship, actually.

IK: Yeah, and it’s a very easygoing communication. Sometimes we solve projects by WhatsApp. We have out BKL group: Baranowitz, Kronenberg, Liran. BKL.

SSR: Too funny.

IK: And we have the BKLY, that is Baranowitz, Kronenberg, Liran, and Yossi [Eliyahoo] from Entourage. The visionary of Entourage, his partner in the food and beverage. We solve projects by WhatsApp.

AB: It’s really fascinating. It’s unbelievable how we do it, but we do it.

SSR: No, it’s great. And for people that might not know Sir Hotels, even though we’ve covered them a lot in HD, how would you describe that brand to others that might not have seen it or experienced your designs?

AB: I think what’s special about the concept, that really, KesselsKramer came up with the concept, but each Sir actually has a personality that is influenced by the context. It could be the interesting building or the neighborhood, and the character of this fictional character, in a way. When you are writing stories, everything is possible. This mentality of a brand that says, I can be anyone that I want, it gives a lot of freedom. And I think what hospitality really needs is freedom to move in any direction it wants. So Sir, when you say Sir, you have a world of imagination opening up in front of you. It’s not like you have a preconceived idea of what is Sir. You don’t know what is Sir. You know the flair, you know that’s it’s easygoing, you know that it’s very high quality, you know that you’re going to get an experience over there.

IK: It’s sexy.

AB: But you don’t know how it’s going to look. You don’t know what it is exactly. And each hotel is different. So, I think that creating this personality-driven space, well, you can bring any personality that you want and build up a story about it. And this, I think, is the greatness of this concept of the brand.

SSR: Love it. What else are you working on that you’re excited about?

AB: Oh, we have wonderful projects, really. We are developing a new Chesterfield for Lenzburg, it’s a Dutch company that reached out to us to design a full collection that is based on the classical Chesterfield. It was inaugurated in the Salon del Mobile two years ago, and it’s going to be a product on the shelf quite, quite, quite soon. So we are really excited about this new baby of ours. Then, with Marco Buriel in Madrid, he’s a choreographer, we developed a stage scenery for the Rusalka Opera, which is fascinating. We never designed an opera set, so that’s amazing. And then we did the W Prague. And the W Ibiza is going to open in July.

SSR: Wow. I love Prague. That city is just so interesting. It’s magical.

AB: Yeah, it is.

IK: And we got such an amazing building. The buildings, they have a soul and you need to hear the story of the buildings. And this one, it’s a very well-known historical building, the Grand Hotel Europa, an Art Nouveau building. It was built as a hotel. And there are so many stories around this building. The difficult thing was to pick the leading one.

SSR: Yeah, to edit yourself. Yes, I understand.

AB: It’s a one of a kind. So many stories involved with this building. Like one, Kafka gave his only lecture ever in this hotel, for example. So, you get all these anecdotes. For us, it’s like condiments. Wow, let’s do a carpet of cockroaches. Metamorphosis of Kafka. Let’s do something with this, with this design. It’s a fascinating building, really. And behind it we are building a new wing for this hotel. Completely modern, so you have this Art Nouveau, which is all inspired by flora and by gardens and greens. We called it the frozen garden, and we are building a real garden in the back. So this whole story of the hotel is moving from the frozen garden to the real garden. This is the story that we developed for that particular hotel. It’s fascinating.

SSR: Very cool. You mentioned at the beginning that you both were taking the time to think about design and taking a step back. How do you think hospitality in general, or design in general, will change—if it will change—due to COVID and the last three months. How do you think we’ll come out on the other side of this?

AB: The bottom line is that you can really say that hotels are about eat, sleep, experience, repeat. That’s the story of hotels today. It just varies what you eat and how you sleep. But what we feel, really, is that the big changes, there will be changes. But it will not come from the big brands. Every avant-garde becomes a classic at the end, and I think the avant-gardes are the smaller hotels, the visionary, young, and relentless people who say, ‘I want to make a change. I want to do something different. I want to change reality.’ And these guys are moving really quickly, and they don’t have any burden on their shoulders. They wake up and they do it.

We truly believe, and this is part of the things that Irene and I were busy thinking while we were posing and reflecting during the COVID—and developing as well—we’ve been developing a new vision for hospitality that goes beyond hospitality. And this is the moment where hospitality becomes completely communal and changes completely the way it performs.

Beyond COVID, if you just look at cities today, you see by 2050, 70 percent of the world population will be living in cities. And then you look at the workforce of the world becoming freelancers and independent. Now everybody would love to live in the centers of the cities, but they are going to be extremely expensive. There will be not enough space for everyone. And then you look at [other areas]. Most of them, like white elephants with great infrastructure, already invested everything. And they are doing 70 percent, 80 percent of occupancy or whatever. And they have so much more ability to use the resources in a much more effective way.

And we say listen, if you open them completely to the city, not just the public spaces but also the guestrooms, and you turn them into working areas, working rooms, and you give those independent freelancers the ability to use these spaces and then go down and make the public spaces engaging with the city, creating them in such a way that it’s pop-ups, its shows, it’s workshops, it’s lectures, and it’s jazz nights, or rock nights or whatever. And you make it like an ecosystem, then you create something new. Then if you want to sleep here you can, but this is not the main thing. The main thing is that we created the place that the city can really get in, make it hers, make it part of the city in a totality, in a holistic way. Not just say, you can eat in our restaurant or sit in our coffee [shop].

IK: Not only for tourism, actually. Think about the empty hotels right now and how they actually could serve the city in a different way, and they are closed.

AB: So, there’s a lot to be done, and we’re extremely busy with it ourselves. I think hospitality should go beyond hospitality.

SSR: I think we’re just on the edge of what we’ll see and how it will change. Looking back over 20 years, and I love that you just went through the history of what you’ve seen, what do you wish you had known when you were starting out? Or what do you know now that you wish you had known starting out? What have been some of those challenges that would’ve been nice to have a little heads up on?

IK: It comes with experience and age.

AB: I think that one of the things that we learned is not to fall in love with your ideas, because when you fall in love with ideas, you don’t see straight anyway, because love blinds. So, this is one of the lessons, I think. This is something that if we knew before, it would save us quite a lot of broken hearts. Yeah, this is one lesson, I think.

IK: Another thing that you learn with experience, that everything is a process.

AB: Patience is key. And at the end of the day, it’s all about people. That’s very important.

IK: This is where it starts and ends. That’s why we design for people, and we design for emotions, and we create emotional landscapes and social platforms for people to connect and exchange—to be inspired and celebrate life.

SSR: I think that shows through in so much of your work, and this is a perfect place to stop. I can’t thank you both enough. Every time I speak with you I just love it. You guys are amazing people and amazing talents, so thank you for taking the time today to speak with us.

AB: With pleasure. We could’ve spoken for another 10 hours.

SSR: I know, we could go on and on. We’ll do it again. Hopefully next time in real life.

AB: We’ll see you soon.

IK: Big hug and stay safe.