Roman Alonso

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, I’m here with Roman. Roman, thanks so much for joining us today. How are you?

Roman Alonso: I’m good. Thank you.

SSR: Great.

RA: Nice to be here.

SSR: So we always start at the beginning with this podcast. So where did you grow up?

RA:  I grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. Cuban parents, my whole family’s Cuban. My brother and I were really the only Venezuelans and growing up there was… That’s fantastic, what can I tell you? I mean, I love that country and I feel really lucky to have been born and raised there. We lived in Caracas, which in the seventies was a pretty cosmopolitan place and we lived in a very urban setting. Our neighborhood was right in the middle of the city. So very young I was free to go about the city, pretty much my own and with my friends. It was very interesting because it was also a very dangerous place at the same time. So it was this sort of strange extremes.

RA: We lived in the middle of nature, but it was also very urban and at the same time, it was a place where I felt very free as a child, but we had all kinds of crime and kidnapping threats and all that kind of stuff. And at one point we even had bodyguards, I didn’t even know we had. So it was an interesting way to grow up and leaving in late, we left in 1978, I was really happy to leave because I wanted to live in the US. All I wanted to do was the, McDonald’s Big Mac and I was going to be the happiest kid on earth because we didn’t have that in Venezuela. But in retrospect, later on in life, I realized how much I loved it and how much I would’ve liked to have had a life there.

SSR: Right.

RA: Rather than where we ended up, but you have no control of these things. The universe takes you where it does and that’s it.

SSR: Have you gone back to visit?

RA: I did. For many, many years. I went as much as I could. I love it there and I had lots of friends there, but last time I went was in 2002, it was already getting difficult to go as an American. I had finally become an American citizen and I had lost my Venezuelan passport because at that point, they didn’t really allow you to have both and it became difficult going there. And things changed very rapidly, and now it’s a place where I don’t know when I’ll ever go back, basically. My parents both were exiled from Cuba and my poor mother, I mean, she’s been a double exile. She also was exiled from Venezuela. So-

SSR: Oh, no.

RA: I feel like Venezuela’s going to be like Cuba. It’s going to be one of those places that I don’t know. We don’t know what’s going to happen to it and who knows if I’ll ever go back. My mother never went back to Cuba. So yeah. There’s a certain amount of sadness that comes with that realization.

SSR: I’m sure. I couldn’t even imagine not being able to go-

RA: Yeah, it’s tragic. It is. It’s a very tragic situation, but I know you learn a lot from moving around the way we did and from having everything and losing everything a couple of times in your life. It definitely makes you strong in interesting ways.

SSR: Right.

RA: Resilient is the word I think.

SSR: Resilient, for sure. So you left in 1978. Why did you all leave Venezuela? Was it for your parents’ careers or?

RA: As it happened in a lot of places in Latin America. At one point or another, some people have to go and we had to go.

SSR: You had to go. So where did you go?

RA: We went to Miami.

SSR: Oh, wonderful.

RA: Yes. We happened to have a home there at the time and it was where we landed and that brought about a whole new life. Very, very, our lives changed completely. It’s almost like we’re defined by what happened before and after that. Yeah.

SSR: And were you creative as a kid? I mean, was anyone in your family creative? Did you have any early inkling that design or architecture would be part of your career moving forward?

RA: I used to draw a lot as a kid and I loved anything that was art related. I loved going to museums as a kid and looking at art. And my father was pretty artistic, although not in his work and my mom had a real appreciation for things, beautiful things. I guess my whole life I’ve always wanted to be creative or wanted to be an artist, but never really felt like I quite had it in me. So I went a different direction, which was really to work with creative people. That’s something I’ve consistently done my whole life, is almost help those who are creative around me. Safeguard their space and their process is something I learned how to do really early on in my professional career and something I really enjoy. So always surrounding myself with people who are creative, but I guess I was always a frustrated artist, myself.

SSR: Got it. And going to Miami, was the US everything you imagined it would be? I mean, what was that like coming?

RA: No, it’s, not to be really horrible. I mean, we went from a pretty cosmopolitan urban existence to living in the really out, like out in the suburbs in west Miami and I was really isolated all of a sudden. We had nowhere to go or walk to or… I had lost all my friends. There were all kinds of issues. A lot of things happened when we arrived in the US. Our family dynamics completely changed, we even had a terrible car accident. I was out of commission for a while because of it. So it was a really horrible arrival to the US and I hated Miami, I hated it. In fact, my four years in high school, all I wanted to do was leave and my focus was to get out. Really pushed me to get out.

RA: And my salvation in those years were magazines. I had a subscription to Interview. I had a subscription to Details when it was still like a downtown magazine. And those magazines provided a world that I kind of escaped to. And when I was about 15 years old, I think it was my 80/81. I went to visit, a friend of my mother’s had a daughter who I was friends with and went to visit her in New York. They actually lived in Union City, actually. And she was like a disco queen and she took me out, and I was 15. And she took me out to all these clubs. I went to Zeena, and I went to Studio 54 and she took me to Fiorucci and I bought some clothes there and I got my haircut. I got an asymmetrical haircut and I have to say that very short trip, because I was only there for like four or five days really changed my life.

RA: Because from that moment on my focus was to go to New York and I didn’t care what I did.

SSR: Right.

RA: There was something about that experience that really shaped what I wanted for my future, but I had no idea what that was, none. And in fact, while in high school, my mom… I applied to NYU, but my mother didn’t want me to live in New York. She was afraid of what my life would be like there. And so she made me also apply to schools in Boston. So I applied to BC and BU and NYU, and I got into all three. I was a really good student in high school, very sheltered sort of, Catholic high school in Miami.

RA: And I got into all three, but she wouldn’t let me go to NYU. So I picked BU and that’s where I ended up going and there was definitely enough going on there.

SSR:  Yeah.

RA: Of what I wanted, which was really meet people, party, learn about life. I went from a very sheltered existence to quite the opposite. I met all kinds of people from all over the world.

SSR: Right.

RA: And I spent as much time as possible going to New York and clubbing, which is what I really wanted to do. At school I moved from one major to another, I went from Film major to Journalism major, to Photo Journalism to… And then I ended up with an Art History major because my concentration of credits was mostly there, but I had no academic inclination whatsoever. And at the time I worked at Parachute on Newbury street and that was one of the things that I would look at those ads and interview.

SSR: Yeah.

RA: And so I ended up working there somehow. And then I went to Parsons for a summer, thinking I would try to take art classes, but that didn’t go anywhere. I just really partied the whole time and barely went to class. I worked at Parachute there too, in the city for a little bit. And my life was taking a shape and I didn’t know, really. I threw parties in Boston at clubs, I was doing club promoting. And so my life was really about that. And again, just really, how am I going to get into that world that those magazines’ kind of opened up to me?

SSR: Right.

RA: Like showed me. And so I don’t know how it happened, but when I left Boston, a couple of friends of my mine and I, we moved to New York. And, and then that was another episode, that was another chapter opening up that really shaped things.

SSR: Got it.

RA: But I’ve never known what I wanted to do, never. As a kid, I wanted to be an architect. I always say that, when you were like eight or nine years old and people were like, what are you going to be when you grow up? I’d be like, I’m going to be an architect.

SSR: Yeah.

RA: I know what that meant. Right before I went, no, it was freshman year in high school, that summer between freshman and sophomore year, my mom got me an internship and a friend of hers who was an architect and it was so boring. I mean, there was not a… You could hear a pin drop and people would just draw. There would be drafting all day long.

SSR: Yeah.

RA: And somehow that wasn’t what I wanted. And then shortly after that, I went to visit my friend in New York and then everything changed. And I was like, architect, forget it, boring. So I’ve never known, really. I just kind of have always gone with it.

SSR: Right.

RA: Doors open and you look in, and you decide whether you’re going to walk in or not. That’s how I led my whole, adult life and listen. Listen to the universe.

SSR: Yeah, you’ll end up where you need to be. So question, just talking hospitality, was there one nightclub experience or bar experience or your promoting days, or your New York trip that just sticks with you?

RA: Well, listen, I mean, I missed the 70’s in New York, but I was there in the early 80’s. And I got to say that was a great time for this. And I did go to Area and I did go to Danceteria a lot and Limelight. All those places definitely had an effect on me. My parents entertained a lot, so there was always a party at our house. And so I watched my mom how she did that and she loved doing it.

SSR: Right.

RA: And there was a way that she did it, that has definitely affected the way I still look at hospitality. It’s more, you make people comfortable, you give them a space to be themselves, basically. There was never formality in our house in terms of entertaining. I remember nights when people, I remember people taking down a door in our apartment and putting it across their lap, on a sofa to play the drums. So my mom was always… And our house is immaculately maintained, but she had no problem with somebody taking a door down, so that they would enjoy the door in some way.

So I’ve always learned that you just have to create a space for people to relax and be themselves. And so all those clubs, that was what? It was escapism, right? It’s like just creating a scene so that you could really lose yourself. And there was something so attractive to me about that. Granted, there were a lot of drugs involved and things like that, but it was a space where you could express yourself.

SSR: Right.

RA: And I was always a really quiet, reserved kid. And in a way I still am shy, in some way, but those experiences opened me up quite a bit. It was where I could escape and be perhaps someone else. So that had a huge impact on me, for sure.

SSR: Okay. So you have all these amazing experiences, after Boston you moved to New York with friends. What did you end up doing there? What fell into your lap?

RA: Well, I decided that I wanted to work in magazine.

SSR: Okay.

RA: That’s what I was going to go for. So at the time you just interviewed at the Human Resources department at Hearst and and that’s what I did. And then you kind of waited until they called you. So there was a job and I needed to work immediately. There were four of us that moved together to New York and we found an apartment which I lived for 12 years while I lived in New York. I stayed in that apartment. It was a rent stabilized apartment, which is two bedroom, very rare find at the time. And we each had to contribute to the rent. So we all found jobs. And in the meantime, while I waited for the magazines, I worked at a design firm, actually. A design firm that did offices for Steelcase. And I worked at World Trade Center, at the world financial center. I was at the time with my boss, who was a designer, I was an assistant on offices for American Express, up on the towers. So I spent some time there, oddly enough. It was a really interesting experience. I was kind of natural, I was one of these people that I took tasks very seriously and did my job and they liked me. But I didn’t want to do that. So the minute that Hurst called me, there was a job at Connoisseur Magazine in the production department. I was a production assistant. So I was, I traffic pages. At the time there was no computers. So I would have to traffic, the mechanical’s from department to department. So I learned a lot, immediately learned how the magazine worked.

I met everyone. All the editors knew me because I would wait for them for approvals. And I even spent a lot of time in Thomas Hoving’s office, he was the Editor-in-chief. And he would be on the phone with like Harry Kissinger and I’d be listening.

SSR: Absorbing

RA: Absorbing. It was interesting. I’d did that for about a year. And I also, same time the production department for advertising was shared with Esquire. So I’d also checked all the ads and stuff for Esquire Magazine, we’re on the same floor. So I met a lot of people there too. It was a good place to be. And I picked up a lot very quickly. And then I got called for a job at Mirabella when it launched.

And that was the first sort of PR-ish job that I took on because I basically worked as set coordinator for her on the marketing side. So I used to do all her speaking engagements and her parties and stuff like that. It was definitely like a Devil Wears Prada period. She definitely prepped me for what was next, which was the Pressman family. But I learned a lot from her. She was really tough on me in particular. She required something from me that I was not prepared to do. I was not prepared for that job, at all. And so it was difficult and I learned a lot. Well, I was there for about a year and a half. Again, worked with a lot of interesting people that I never imagined I would ever get to meet or experience. And it was a good time in New York, still late 80’s.

And while I was working at Connoisseur, I didn’t make any money there. I mean, it was really low salary. So to supplement my income, I would work at Barney’s.

SSR: Oh.

RA: Freelance. My girlfriend at the time, worked in the PR department at Barney’s. She had gotten a job there out of school. She was an assistant and she would get me these gigs. And I would do anything they asked me to do because Barney’s was one of those places in those magazines.

SSR: Yep.

RA: They were part of that world and I would write calligraphy their invitations. I would set up chairs overnight for shows. I would help them set up for events. And there was someone there, Mallory Andrews was in charge of PR. Publicity is what we called it, but, and she took a liking to me, because I was really good at executing things.

RA: And eventually when I started at Mirabella, I couldn’t do that anymore. So it was a bigger job, but I was at a party at Barney’s while I was at Mirabella. And she asked me if I knew anybody that wanted a job in the PR department, doing coordination for out of town stores. We’re starting to open stores outside of New York. And she needed someone that was going to be like an advanced person. That were going to go check out these cities and stuff like that, and I asked her, “Do you think I could do the job?” And she said, “Yes, I would love for you to do the job,” and I took that job immediately. And so I ended up at Barneys. And that was bizarre because in the end I was at Barney’s working in a place that was part of that fantasy. But also I was working with Glen O’Brien, who’s column I used to read and Ronnie Cook who started details and all of a sudden all these… And we had fallen into a group downtown where we were friends with the kids from paper, with Kim and David.

RA: And then my girlfriend became really good friends with Ventura’s wife Cece and so all of a sudden we were hanging out with the people that I was reading about, and as a high schooler. So somehow I manifested this and it happened, and I was at Barney’s for five or six years. And it was definitely, it was school. It was a really great school in such deep appreciation for what I learned there and the people who taught me.

SSR: What did you learn there? So were you opening store? Were you doing the PR for the new stores? Were you doing some stuff for the flagship?

RA: All of it. I mean, we were a small department, there were five of us, a small department that generated a lot of work. And so both my concentration was on store openings outside of New York. I was still part of the team in New York and worked on all the events. So press wise, I concentrated out of town and that’s not true. They also threw Chelsea Passage at me because nobody wanted it. And I was the newest kid in the department. So they were like, you’re going to do Chelsea Passage. You’re going to deal with Mrs. Pressman. And I was ready for her at this point. And she had to learn so much from her too. The Pressman’s were great actually for us who worked there. They gave us a lot of rope, Gene Pressman, who was technically our boss was the head of creative services.

He really believed in us bringing in ideas and allowed for this dialogue. And at the time it was… The creative services was made up of publicity, display, store design, and advertising. So the four departments worked very closely together. In fact, that’s where I met Steven Johanknecht my business partner currently, we started working together then. And so the team was great, because it was… There were five of us in publicity and then the advertising department was a little more extensive and then display was huge and it was Samad Uddin and Steven and a big team. But the core… There were about 15 of us that worked conjunctively on everything that happened at the store in terms of launches, events, new… All kinds of launches for designers or stores or whatever. And the advertising campaigns would play into our events.

Our events played into what happened with display. It was a coordinated effort and the decisions were made together. And that really shaped how Steven and I work today. We learned that one thing absolutely affected the other. And at the time, I mean, most people don’t know what Barney’s was back then, because you know, it really changed after the Pressman’s were gone. But at the time it was a really, really influential place. And I got to work with incredible people. Anywhere I went, if I picked up the phone and called someone and said we’d like for you to work with us, they would say yes. My first week at Barney’s I had meetings, we were doing something for amfAR. This project for amfAR where we were making product with artists. And my first week with… I had a meeting with Cindy Sherman and I had a meeting with Jenny Holzer. They were both doing stuff for us. And so people were definitely excited to work with us and it gave us enormous access to creative.

SSR: But it must have been so cool opening these stores. And as you said, really diving into all aspects of what that city was from culture to entertainment, to fashion. You got to art. I mean, those are all the people you wanted in the Barney’s world. So you got to kind of be part of all of that.

RA: It was incredible. I mean, in Houston, we got to work with Dominique de Menil. We did a party at the Menil collection celebrating Robert Rauschenberg’s birthday and the opening of his 1950s show, which we had sponsored. I mean, we got to do all that and I was doing it with my small team and Mallory, who was my boss was so amazing because she really trusted us. We’re such a tight team. It was an enormous amount of trust, but there was a steel hand behind it. And she guided us in a very… She really guided us. But gave us also a lot of room to make mistakes. And then she always backed us up when we made them. And that’s been also shaped the way I work with my team today. I really, I think about her all the time and the way that she taught us and the way that she gave… Allowed us to grow within that space.

SSR: Do you now lead that way? Similarly?

RA: Yes, both Steven and I, because we both learn how to… That’s the way we always were managed. And everything I’ve ever did after that, every other team I’ve ever led. That’s how I worked with them. You set the parameters, you teach them what you know, and then you let them go, right? You stay attentive, but you have to let them make their own decisions and make their own mistakes. And then you always have to be ready to help them fix it. If something happens and you always back them up. That was something I learned. Gene was actually really good about that. Gene Pressman. If we fucked up, he would never say you fucked up. He was like, how are we going to do this? How are we going to take care of this? And Valerie was the same way. And they will help you fix it. There’s a great amount of trust that comes with that. But you earn it. You do earn that trust.

SSR: Right. That’s easier said than done, right? I mean, it’s hard to be like, go free, good luck. But I think you get amazing results if you can.

RA: Yeah. Well, that’s why you have to… But there is a mentorship that comes with that. There’s a process of really teaching people what you know. The mistakes you have made, being very honest about the mistakes you have made. When you are showing somebody the way, there’s a certain amount of humility you have to have so that they also see that it’s okay to be humble and to accept your own mistakes and to get in front of them as best as you can. There’s nothing wrong with doing something wrong as long as you learn from it. I think, as long as you make sure that people learn that and that you have their back, that you create a safe space for them. And I think that’s how they best develop.

SSR: Okay. So you left at 26. Where did you go? What was next?

RA: Isaac Mizrahi. Yeah, I was working with him and his team on the premier of Unzipped in Los Angeles. We had just opened the Barney store in Beverly Hills. And so we were working on that party together and in the process of putting that party together, Nina Santisi, who wanted to really move into more film production. And she had been with him from the beginning. I was looking for someone to kind of fill her shoes, hard shoes to fill, but she brought me on board and I became his image director, whatever that was. But I was technically in charge of like advertising and events and his identity as a whole. He was starting to grow into more… He was starting to take on licensing, not only for accessories, but also in Asia. And also was about to launch a secondary line.

RA: So the company was changing and they brought me on board to kind of unify things. I brought all the advertising in house. I set up a… I worked on all the licensing in Asia, which was when I started going to Japan actually, in the nineties was because of Isaac. And working with the Japanese. Huge school again that I will later, I would later utilize those… What I learned then. You never know when these things are going to come in handy later on. And so I would just take all these things on. I mean, I started doing the licensing because nobody else wanted to. Nobody wanted to go to Japan, oddly enough, at Isaac. And I was like, I’ll go.

SSR: Yeah. You’re like, why not?

RA: And so it was Japan, Korea, and Singapore. And I worked with those teams and it was my first sort of foray into that.

SSR: What was it like working for Isaac?

RA: It was great. The word fashion designer is thrown a lot at anybody these days. He was the real thing. He is the real thing and I learned a lot of interesting things from him. For example, I mean, I learned everything I know about color from him, because before that I was a fashion person that only wore black and my world was really just black and white. I really didn’t look at color and he’s a really great colorist. And I started learning about how things… How colors come together and the nuances and how really there are no neutrals. For him there was no such thing as a neutral. He would take things like hot pink and he would say show me one color that doesn’t go with this.

RA: And he was right. Every color would go with it. And so I don’t know, I really learned things like that. And then also I learned, and this came from Barneys too, but it was this. I got really good at proposing things in a way that made that person think it was their original idea. Okay.

SSR: I love that.

RA: And that’s the best way to make things happen when you’re working with someone who is highly creative. You find a way to make them realize that somehow that was their idea. Even if it wasn’t. And I use that a lot, I always have, and it’s a very… It might sound underhanded, but it isn’t, it’s just really how you present things to people so that they recognize that in fact, it is a good thing to explore and that it is a good thing for them to consider. And ultimately they make that decision. And I do that with my clients, for example, today. In the end, I’m just suggesting things to them and educating them on things. But ultimately they have to sign the check and it’s their house. They’re going to live in it. So I’m just here to propose the best path there and how you do that is something you learn.

SSR: Yeah.

RA: And you learn from working with people with big creative egos. Those are the best people to learn how to do that with.

SSR: So you were young too working with him. So did he give you, I mean, obviously he gave you runway too. I mean, I feel like this has been a theme.

RA: Yeah. And we were all young. We were all young working with him. Again, small team with lots of output, lots of responsibilities, lots of projects. So you get to do everything. And we all really did everything. There was no hierarchy in that sense. We all got our hands dirty. When it was Showtime, we were all there. That week we didn’t sleep. We got it done, in a haze of Krispy Kream donuts and coffee. We would get the show done and it’s like that insane amount of work for that 20 minute show. And then he was amazing because then the next day, we all got flowers at home.

SSR: Aw.

RA: With a note from him. So he is that person. He’s just a really special person. And I loved working with him and when he closed the company down, it was really hard. It was… We were all really sad that ultimately he had to make a decision because Chanel pulled the plug and I suppose he could have continued without them, but I think he really needed to move in a different direction. Fashion had changed at that point. It was different. It was 1998. And the Prada’s and the LMVH’s were there already knocking on the door. Things were changing. They were becoming more corporate. And I think he saw that and realized like, oh, maybe this isn’t for me? And he had so many other creative endeavors that he wanted to go into that it didn’t make sense for him to really stick it out.

And so, yeah, so that opened up the next chapter, because I interviewed for jobs at LMVH. I almost took a couple and they were all for like corporate communications director for this and that. And at the same time I had started to go to LA. I had become really good friends with Lisa Eisner through my years at Isaac, she was his muse. And then I brought her on sort of as a an actual employee to become our creative director. And we became really close friends with it, all the advertising together and traveled together. And we made a really good team from the beginning and she was like, come out to LA and you’ll figure out what you want to do here. And I was still interviewing in New York and she sang the song of the siren and got me to stay in LA. I turned down all those jobs and stayed in LA and started a publishing company with her.

SSR: Amazing.

RA: That was the next chapter. Yeah.

SSR: What did you want this publishing company to do?

RA: Our goal was to celebrate artists and photographers who had not been… Who had been overlooked perhaps and had not been given the opportunity to have a book of their work and also celebrate subcultures because we were both really interested in them. And it was interesting because at the same time they were doing these books, our dear friend, Amy Spindler, who was at the time, the style editor for the New York Times Magazine, gave us a gig. And she was another person that had an enormous effect on my life. I owe her so much and it was such a sad loss because she definitely left us way too soon, but she gave us this big chance. She gave us the opportunity to do whatever stories we wanted to for the style section on culture. So we would pick whatever we wanted. And it was very wide. We went to Las Vegas and covered the rockabilly convention.

And then we went to Paris and she be at Pierre Cardin and interviewed. And then at the same time we went and visited and interviewed Betsy Bloomingdale at her house about entertaining. And we did about 30 stories for the Times and it was between that and our books, we had incredible access. It was like, who do we want to meet? And we literally would just do it. We’d pick up the phone and be like, we’re calling from the New York Times and we’d like to do a story on you. Who’s going to say no to that?

SSR: No one.

RA: It was either that or, “Oh we have this publishing company and we’d love to publish a book of your work.” Who’s going to say no to that? So those were five years where I exclusively did that and they were amazing because there was the first time in my life where I did something that was mine, that was mine and Lisa’s that we developed together for ourselves. It was ours. I had never done that before. I always worked for other people. And needless to say, I learned from her. She changed my life and she changed the way I saw everything. She changed… I mean, my life in LA is a completely different life than I had New York. Thanks to her. So I owe a lot to her in that sense, for sure.

SSR: Do you miss New York at all?

RA: There are moments. I miss New York then. I have such nostalgia. I have such nostalgia for New York in the eighties when I was living there in the early nineties. But I go to New York now and I feel a bit disconnected. I love it. But I love it in a different way. It’s always a good injection. But then I always want to go home. I always want to go back to California.

SSR: Got it. So wait, I have a question. How did you get funding for books for these artists?

RA: Good question.

SSR: Because it’s still a challenge, right? So…

RA: It was even more challenging then, because printing was so expensive. It’s different now. It’s not quite the same, but we asked people for money and we had sponsors, there were people that… Friends who would sponsor certain books and we would use that, the funds, to produce that book. And then we would produce a couple of others with those funds. It was… At the time was the Visionaire sort of roadmap to publishing. And that was happening at the same time.

And we kind of took a page from that. So for example, we did a book of Ron Galella’s work and it was when Tom Ford was at Gucci and he had, we knew that he used his pictures for inspiration in a big way. So we asked him if he would write the introduction to the book and sponsor it. And so his sponsorship of that book actually got us enough funds to do a couple of others. And then we also did the same thing with Peter Morton. We did a book on Las Vegas that he sponsored and that also bankrolled a couple of others, but it was really hard. You don’t make any money. It.

RA: Couple of others, but it was really hard. You don’t make any money. It costs money. So that’s why the gig at the New York Times was so helpful because I had burnt through my severance package from Isaac [Mizrahi] really early on, and I needed to get a job. I needed to pay the rent. That’s where the New York Times was really helpful. I still did little PR jobs secretly. It’s funny because I did PR jobs for people like Andre Balazs. I helped him open The Standard in Hollywood, for example. I helped him with that party. I worked with Nadine Johnson when she was setting up her LA outreach. I helped her with lists and things like that. But nobody really knew I was doing that. Cut to years later, and I was actually working with Andre on projects for The Standard and for the Chateau as Commune. All those relationships played into what we ended up doing with Commune. All of them.

SSR: This is the perfect segue. How and why did Commune come about, and how did Steven and you re…

RA: Well, Steven had eventually left Barney’s and gone to work at first at Donna Karan doing all her stores. Then at Studio Sofield, where he was the studio director. There, he worked on the Gucci stores and presidential and stuff like that for a few years. But he wanted to leave New York eventually, and he did what most people in New York did when they wanted to leave New York. They went to work at The Gap. He moved to San Francisco. There was a period of time when that was the way out. That was the way out.

SSR: I know a bunch of people who did that.

RA: Yeah. I mean, a lot of people did that. Some people would stay, and some people would go right back to New York. He stayed. He loved San Francisco. He worked at Banana Republic, actually. But I think it was only in San Francisco. But he didn’t want to go back to New York, so I encouraged him to come down to Los Angeles. He wanted to maybe do some interior design there. At the time, I had two other friends who are production designers who also wanted to do interiors. I had a friend who needed a little store designed, like a jeans store. I thought, oh, well Steven can do that.

RA: Then my friend had a friend that needed help with a restaurant. I was, like, you guys should meet. Maybe you can work on these projects together. We set up this dinner, and at that dinner, Commune was created. I had no intention of being part of it, although I’m pretty sure I came up with the name. Although that, everybody has their own memory of it, but I’m pretty sure I came up with it.

SSR: Can I ask, what was the name about?

RA: We all drank a lot of sake that night, but I kind of think I remember me coming up with that. But others may argue on that one. But anyway. At that dinner, we came up with this concept of a holistic approach to design. We each had our own Rolodex of people that we could tap into. The idea was to create specific teams to resolve design problems for different clients in different ways. Initially, we weren’t going to have a staff. It was just us putting together specific teams for things.

So those two first two jobs we did, for example that jeans store we designed, I called Doug Lloyd, who had worked with us at Barney’s, was the art director of Barney’s in advertising. At that time was working with Gucci and Tom, doing that whole identity revamp. I asked him, “Would you do the logo and the packaging for this tiny, little jeans store on Beverly?” And he said yes.

Then we tapped into another person to help us put together elements for the interior, and we tapped into our contacts in the set design world in LA to actually build out the store. We had recently found Alma Allen, who was out in LA making things, and I remember from New York from his days in front of the post office in SoHo. He had moved to LA, and so we put him in the mix. With all those people, we created this little, really beautiful little store. The same thing happened with the restaurant we were doing.

It was really assembling these teams from our contacts. But that changed very quickly. We started to get clients that needed move follow through. In fact, it was Stila Cosmetics that changed our business because we got them as a client. They wanted us to do their store design concept. They had just been bought by Estee Lauder. Jeanine Lobell is somebody that I had worked with when Stila was launched at Barney’s in 1991. I knew her from then, as had Steven. It was someone who had started working for her that also had worked with Steven at Barney’s. Barney’s again, right?

RA: My role at the beginning was really on the branding and graphics side, but eventually, I started doing interiors because we just got busy.

SSR: Right.

RA: Clients requested me to do them because I had created a relationship with them. But I learned everything on the job.

SSR: Amazing. So you were always an artist or designer, you just hadn’t used it yet.

RA: I guess. I mean, I’m still not totally comfortable with the term designer. Although yeah, certainly I am a designer. I guess, when I started becoming more comfortable with it was when I moved into my new apartment six years ago, and all of a sudden, I realized, yeah. All these things I’m living with are things that I designed. But that was really the first realization. Like oh, yeah. I did design that light fixture. Hm.

But until then, I was just really feeling more like a facilitator. I was just helping make things, or… And that’s what I did for so many, many, so many, many, many years. Created the situation and the space for someone to do something wonderful. That was my goal, really to do that well.

SSR: Love that. So wait, your LA apartment. Tell us about it. Is it a reflection of all these years of what Commune has become? How would you describe it, if you had to, or could you?

RA: Oh, God. It’s a bit of a repository for things that I’ve collected. I was never a buyer of real estate, and this happened very quickly and I didn’t really process it. All of a sudden, I own this place. It’s in a tower, in a doorman tower in Los Angeles. It’s the last way I thought I would live in Los Angeles. It’s like New York living in Los Angeles. How did that happen?

SSR: You should be in a bungalow somewhere.

RA: Yeah, that’s what I always thought. I certainly rented a lot of houses in LA, but I don’t know. This just happened. It is an apartment, but it is on Griffith Park, and I face the park, and it’s a beautiful view that actually reminds me of the view from the apartment I grew up in Caracas. It was the weird thing. Both apartments face north, they both face this hillside.

I wasn’t planning on buying this place. I saw it because I was looking for a place to rent in the building. I walked in, and I just… I was standing in the balcony, and I told the broker, I was like, “So how much is this again?” She told me, and she was like… I didn’t even know what that meant, how much it was. How much would that be mortgage-wise? I didn’t understand any of it. But I owned it. That was on a Monday, and by Friday, I owned it. It happened very quickly.

Then I had to renovate it because it was… I had to completely renovate because I couldn’t live in it the way it was. That became a project, and it is a reflection of Commune in that it’s filled with all the things we make and all the things that I’ve worked on in terms of collaborations with artists and manufacturers and things like that. I did use our own product throughout, and I continue to because I’m still changing it. It’s a never-ending process.

It’s tiny. It’s 150 square feet. It’s literally the size of a New York apartment, but I’m constantly shifting things and changing things. It’s really fun. It’s really fun to be able to do that. It’s fun, and it’s also really painful because-

SSR: Because you’re always renovating your place, changing.

RA: Yeah.

SSR: Okay, so coming back to Commune. A holistic approach, a look at design. How do you approach projects? How do you guys… Client comes in. What’s the next steps? How do you facilitate and make sure that the Commune affect happens?

RA: There are things that are really important to us. We take steps to make sure that those things happen. One of them is we always really want the project, our work to be well integrated into the architecture or the site or the place. We do a really deep dive into whatever that is. The other is we do a deep dive into the client’s head because it’s really important that we see things the same way.

It’s a bit of a therapy process, psychotherapy process where we ask all the questions that we need to ask and really read between the lines. Part of it is a lot of visual things that we show them to try and get into their head. Why do you like this? Why do you like this picture? What do you like about it? What is it about this color that you gravitate towards? It looks like you’re into this, not this. They’re like, “No, I’m into that!” And I’m like, “No, no, no. It doesn’t sound like you…” Literally asking a lot of questions because I think people, what they first comes out of their mouth is not necessarily what they want to say. I’m always digging deeper and deeper.

The beginning is really getting to know them and getting to know the project as best as we can, and then from there, we do research. Once we know what direction we want to take, then we do all the research to go in that direction. It’s rigorous in that way. It’s important for us that things don’t feel, we say Disney-fied, that they were just plopped into something. That they actually are integrated and authentic and that they feel localized and that they feel like they’re part of something. We don’t like fantasy.

We like fantasy that’s rooted in something. If there is going to be fantasy, it’s got to be rooted in something. In a narrative that is real, that it’s rooted in life. There’s a process in there that we need to go through. We don’t do things quickly. We’re not the people you call if you want something done by next week or next month or, no. Our process are lengthy usually, and it’s because we put so much into the first phase of conceptualizing because we like to create a language that’s strong enough, rooted enough, authentic enough that it can carry us through the whole process.

When things shift later down the road and we have to make decisions on the fly, we’re making those decisions based on that language that we created and we believe in and everyone signed up for. It just gives you a very clear roadmap. You stick with it. In most of our projects… I should say all our projects, when you look at our renderings and you look at the end result, it’s funny. They’re very, very similar. Things don’t change that much. And yet they change tons. It all changes, actually. But somehow, the vision remains the same, and it’s because the language is so solidified. The design may not be solidified, but the language is.

SSR: I love though that your projects, they all have that soul, that feeling that everyone tries to create but is really hard to do. But they don’t have a signature look. Does that make sense? I love that, though. We’ll get a project, and I’m like, oh, that’s Commune. It doesn’t… It feels like you, but it’s not… It doesn’t have a… It has a familiarity, but not a consistent theme.

RA: Thank you. That is the goal. The goal is to bring about something that is connected to the personality of the client, and the client might be a person or it might be a brand. It doesn’t really matter. It’s approached the same way. We work best with people that will collaborate with us truly. The client that we… Our client gets involved in the design process in a way where they are literally designing the project with us. They become part of the design team. This is whether it’s a residence or it’s a hotel or it’s a restaurant.

The owner and client needs to put in enough time so that their personality seeps through into the interior. Because otherwise, it’s not going to have that. It’s not going to have that, whatever you call it. That thing that people always point at. It’s nameless. It’s personality, really, in the end.

That’s why we worked with Ace so well, and we still do. It’s because we become an extension of their team. They become an extension of ours, and we, together, work on creating the personality of this place, this hotel. It doesn’t happen in their office and then ours. It happens at the same time. When we start a project with them, they don’t know what it is, and we don’t know what it is. We figure it out together. There’s a back and forth, and that back and forth is key in creating that je ne sais quoi that is part of Ace, that is the brand. It’s in the process, basically.

SSR: And you’ve worked on a few now, right? The Ace Hotel & Swim Club, Downtown LA, Chicago-

RA: Yeah, we’ve done…

SSR: Kyoto.

RA: We’ve done five projects with them that have been… I’m trying to think. We’ve conceptualized a couple that never materialized, but I think in the end, there were five that we did complete.

SSR: What has it been like to evolve such a brand like Ace that has had such an impact in the industry?

RA: What can I say? I’ve learned so much from that collaboration. It’s something that’s incredibly personal to me because I became fast friends with Alex Calderwood way before Ace. I met him when he was about to launch… Oh, God. His-

SSR: His barbershops? Rudy’s.

RA: Rudy’s. So, yeah. We became fast friends through other friends. I went to visit him in Seattle and saw the Rudy’s there, and he was working on Neverstop. It was actually Claire Darrow who introduced us, who worked with Andre Balazs for many years. She was like, “You guys should meet. You guys are going to be friends.” And we were. We became friends immediately. I think I was on a plane to visit him in Seattle a week after I met him.

I just loved his mind. He was a person like no one I had ever met before. He introduced me to a world in Seattle that I didn’t really know. It was so cool, everything that he touched and everyone that came in contact with him. He had the music promoting business, Neverstop, and he had Rudy’s. His partners were great. I sort of kind of fell in love with him.

Eventually, they had opened the Ace in Seattle. They had just opened it. It was so interesting. It was nothing I’d ever seen before. Then a few years passed. Liz and I actually did an article for the New York Times Magazine on Alex and Rudy’s when they opened in LA. The opening of Rudy’s in LA was a party for one of our books, one of our first books. We had this epic party that was out of control. I always wanted to do self service bar with water coolers. It was one of those crazy parties that LA really didn’t see at the time. We had a lot of fun, he and I, before Commune or Ace really kicked in.

A few years passed, they opened the one in Portland. When they got to New York and Palm Springs, they realized that they needed help. They needed designers to work with. He had met Roman Williams to do the one in New York, and then he tapped us to do Palm Springs. We, as Commune, had never done a hotel. We had never done a hotel, period. Neither one of us really knew how to do a hotel. I think Ace had really only done Seattle and Portland. When I went to see Portland, it was eye opening. That was the first time anyone ever saw someone in a lobby with a laptop and a cup of coffee from next door. As simple as that sounds, no one had ever done that before. Seriously. I remember walking down and, looking at the situation, there were maybe eight people on this big, huge sectional that they had in the lobby. That door into Stumptown next door that went from the lobby into Stumptown. Because it was next door, but you didn’t have to go outside. You just went right through. Nobody had done that before. There were eight people sitting there, having their Stumptown coffee and their laptops, and it really did… I have to say this, I’m so cornball, but it really did like you were looking at some sort of future.

I don’t think he gets enough credit. I really don’t. Because he truly was this visionary, and not only in that. To him, it wasn’t about hotels. It was really about creating culture, and that’s what all of the things that he did, Rudy’s, Neverstop, Ace. It was all about that. It was creating a tribe. It was this, we all connect in some way, and I’m going to create the spaces for us to do that. Whether we’re getting a haircut or staying in a new city or a new place, or going to…place or going to a music venue or whatever it was is really about creating a space we all shared. And you knew, you knew whether you were part of that tribe or not, because he put out enough cues. And he also put together the team around each of these things that could provide all those clues and cues for people to belong. It’s so layered. And again, cut way, way, way short, short, just gone too soon, you know? And that was, it’s still painful. Actually. There was so much that was shared and learned. And so much that came after that.

SSR: Mh-Mhhh

RA: It was hard to lose him. Still is.

SSR: Yeah.

RA: Still is hard, but he gave us a huge opportunity. I mean, he didn’t know any better. His partners didn’t know any better. You know what I mean? And we didn’t know any better. We just figured it out. And there were so many naysayers doing that hotel in Palm Springs. It’s by far the project I’m most proud of also because it’s still there and it’s still there in such a great way.

SSR: Mh-Mhhh

RA: It had such longevity. Everybody tried to copy it and nobody has ever been able to, and nobody knows… I don’t even know why. You know what I mean?

SSR: It’s one of those.

RA: It’s one of those! You cannot replicate this. And people have come to us through the year “that’s what we want.” It’s, well, “sorry, I can’t give you that. I know we did it, but I can’t give it to you.” You know what I mean?

SSR: So going from there, you also do a lot of retail work, which I want to talk about. How… How does that… You do retail, you do residential, you make your own products, you do hospitality. You do, again, whole graphics. How do they inform each other? How do you let them talk to one another through projects and process? Because I do think you learn so much from each of the different disciplines when you’re creating spaces.

RA: Well, we literally listen. Each discipline listens to each other because they physically… our studio’s an open studio. Everybody works with everybody. There are no silos, there are no teams that are set in place. There is no commercial team, and residential team or graphics, they all work together on everything. So there is that dialogue constantly. And it wasn’t always like that. Steven and I have really honed into that in the last six years and brought it back to what it was initially. Because for a long time we were in silos and we were this big, huge design firm and we were unhappy with it, to be very honest, I hated it. Okay? I do not ever want to have 50 employees, I do not ever want to do that again. And these divisions within the studio were highly disruptive for our process, Steven and mine.

So now it’s a small studio. Everybody works together. Everybody, we create teams as needed and as best. So whoever’s best for that project, that’s the person we put in on that project. And there’s also a real open hierarchy. There’s a real mentorship process that we go through. Sometimes a junior gets to be a lead and a senior gets to support them, and that kind of thing happens. So that way everyone gets a chance to learn from their mistakes how to be a great designer. Hopefully that makes the team stronger. It’s a true team spirit. So in that sense everything flows through the studio really easily.

And then there are projects where we actually do do all those things for the project, where we do the graphic identity and we do the interior design and those things speak very clearly to each other. It’s happened… it happens actually more and more. It’s funny our mix of projects has shifted so many times. It’s been 18 years since we started Commune, and we’ve had periods where retail was the primary source of income, where hospitality is in the primary source of income, and then right now it’s residential really. For the last few years, as our business has been primarily residential based, with hospitality. The retail has really taken a backseat, although we’ve done really special, really specialized things in retail, which are really fun because retail gives you this. It’s also happens faster. It’s the only thing that we can do actually quickly, everything else takes a really long time, but you can do retail faster. And that is, that’s fun to bring into the studio, right? This disruption-

SSR: And instant gratification too. You actually get to see your work done instead of five, seven years later.

RA: Absolutely. And there are projects like Heath, for example, we did all the retail stores that through the process of doing those stores with them, our cultures have melded together. We’re like family. I actually was with them yesterday, all day. They’re my friends and we collaborate on all kinds of things together, we’re actually working on something for next fall together. So we make product together, we make exhibitions together. We… a lot of great things have happened, because of retail, to us. So we love it. We love it that way. There’s, there’s an energy, a creative energy that comes from it that I think helps us in other areas.

SSR: So through all of this, through retail, hospitality, resident, is there one part of the process that you still love? How do you and Steven, you talked about how the culture of the company work, but how do you two work together and is it kind of ying and yang or how do you… How do your roles…?

RA: It’s funny. I mean, Steven and I have been working together now since literally since 1990. So we’re talking about over 30 years. Right? And we’ve been friends throughout, we’ve always been friends. At this point we know each other so well, I feel really, really fortunate and really lucky to have someone like that in my life. He’s a true partner and collaborator. So it’s very fluid. We have very different ways of doing things. He’s more methodical. He needs more time. I’m very impulsive. I make decisions really on the fly. As we get older and gain more and more experience, we become closer to each other. Right? Because I was always the one that made these rash decisions that then he had to kind of fix. But with experience, my rash decisions actually are as informed as his. You know what I mean?

SSR: They work out!

RA: They work out. I think our styles have gotten closer. But the teams, when they work with him and they work with me, it’s different process and it’s something that you have to deal with at Commune. If you’re working at commune, you kind of have to learn how to work with both of us. We do some projects together, but the majority of the projects we do separately. Although we show each other everything. There’s nothing that doesn’t get shared and critiqued, not only by the two of us, but everyone. It’s very open that way. Now in terms of the parts of the projects that I enjoy most, for me it’s always the very beginning when we’re first getting to know the project and the client. That digging into who they are, I’m really interested in how people live. I just get a kick out of “How do you live?” You know?

SSR: Yeah.

RA: How do you want to live? And so I get… I really enjoy that process of getting to know them and getting to know the project and doing the research. I’m working on a project, a house in Montecito, that’s a Maybach house. And I always admired Maybach. I didn’t know anything about him. I had been into spaces that were his and always wondered “Wow, this is so cool”, but I never had the time… the time or inclination to look into him. And so this project has given me the space to read six books on him and really learn who he was and I totally got into it. And I think it’s really helping the project that I have that interest.

RA: And so I love that part, but I also love just as much or even more when we start making all this stuff. When I get to go and meet the artisan or the craftsmen, and start talking about the actual thing that we’ve been kind of dreaming about for two years in some cases, three years in some cases, and it has been on our board for all that time. And all of a sudden it’s “Okay, we’re going to make it now.”

SSR: Right.

RA: Are we going to make it? What is it made out of? That’s… That is, I think my favorite for sure. It’s the part I enjoy most.

SSR: Love it. Is there one type of project that you would love to do that you haven’t done yet?

RA: You know, people ask it all the time and I never know because I’ve never, I’ve never known anything past the next week. You know what I mean? My whole life has been this thing of “oh, what are we going to…?” I really have always… Being the son of exiles. Okay. And being an exile person yourself, you realize that you really have to live on the moment.

SSR: Yeah.

RA: Right. And my mom always told me, she is always “You know, you can’t take anything with you. No material thing. The only thing you can take with you is experiences and what you learn.” Right? So in that sense, I’ve always been someone that really lives in the moment. And hasn’t really looked that far ahead. I’m shocked that Commune has been around for 18 years. I never imagined that I would still be here. You know what I mean, doing this. So it’s a… For me, it’s a great surprise that we’re still here and… I’m 56 years old. I’m probably going to do this for rest of my life.

SSR: Yeah.

RA: Who the hell knows? Right? I don’t know. So yeah…

SSR: I guess you probably couldn’t even imagine what you created, or can… did you ever think 18 years ago that this is what it would become?

RA: No. I mean, at the beginning it was really something I thought I would do for a while. Until I had to get a job it’s that kind of thing, always my thing was always thinking because after I left the last job I had and I did all these things, whether it was the books with Lisa or the New York times stuff, or even Commune or all of the freelance projects and stuff, I always kept thinking “I wonder how long I can do this before I have to get a job.” That was always in my head. In a way I still feel that way. I don’t know how long am I going to keep this… Can I keep this going? Because it’s… I feel so lucky to be where I am right now at my age, doing what I love. What I’ve grown to love, because I didn’t know I loved it. So I’ve grown to love what I do. And… pinch me, I don’t know, I get to go to these great places, I meet all these interesting people and affect their lives in a real way. I love it! And for a long time, I was afraid to do residential work, for example, I was really afraid of it. And then when I finally started doing it, I was “Oh my God, I love this, I really… I’m changing people’s lives, I’m helping them.” So, there’s a side of me that loves… loves the work in terms of making things and creating spaces and creating experiences and all that stuff. Another level, it’s also that personal thing where you’re literally helping someone make their life easier, better, what they hope for. It’s, again, kind of corny, but it is there, it’s there.

SSR: Okay. I feel we have to end the conversation, even though I don’t want to, but we always end the podcast asking the question that is the definition or the title of the podcast. What has been your greatest lesson learned, or lessons learned along the way?

RA: That’s a really hard question because the way I see life is we learn and then we die. Seriously, there’s nothing else. So, we are learning, learning, learning, learning, learning, and we die. Right? So, I’ve learned so many goddamn lessons. But I guess the most useful… And I learned it pretty early on… Was shut up and listen. Right? And then listen really carefully, listen between the lines not just what’s at face value. Listen between the lines so that you can ask the right questions.

SSR: Right.

RA: Right. That’s the only way to get… It’s the only way to understand things well enough to move forward on the right path. Because ultimately you are working with people.

SSR: Right.

RA: All about people, and it’s all about communication. So if you, if you don’t know how to listen, you don’t know how to communicate. It’s as simple as that.

SSR: Yeah. Well, love it. And loved our conversation. Thank you for spending the last bit with me and sharing so much about you and your life, and congratulations on all that you’ve created at Commune. Can’t wait to see.

RA: Well, thank you so much. Thank you for having me and it’s been really fun, actually.

SSR: Yeah, great. Well, thank you so much. Hope. Have a great rest of the day and week.

RA: Thanks, you too.