You might think that there is production design — sets for movies, ephemeral, fleeting, superficial spaces made for effect. And there is architecture — solid, permanent, serious and weighty. But you might also argue that — in an age when restaurants, hotels and upscale interiors are themed and drowned in narrative — everything is, in fact, set dressing.
Which brings us to one of the great ironies of contemporary design. Look at almost any modern condo building or residential tower from Seattle to Shenzhen and there will be a sense of sameness, a lack of depth, a glassy eyed banality. Then look at a new, upmarket hotel interior and it will be straining to look ageless, dusted with a faux historic patina; reliable, classy. Its materials will be rich and its air will be thick with the scents of expense.
Take a look at the dark, intriguing interiors of London’s NoMad hotel (the former Bow Street Magistrates’ Court) with its heavy drapes and lush, dark-wood library, its post-industrial greenhouse restaurant and the velvety marble sheen of its bars. Or at the new interiors of Estelle Manor in the Cotswolds, with its stately home chic, chinoiserie, mustard plush and neo-Tudor strapwork. These rich, dense interiors strive for an effect of being beyond fashion, of having been accumulated and considered, of accreting over history. You might look up at the deep green terracotta of the Fitzroy in New York’s industrial Chelsea and wonder to yourself, is this building a century old or five years old? Is it homage or is it history?
Many contemporary architects are a little anxious about history, wary of accusations of pastiche. New York designers Roman and Williams have no such reservations. They bathe in history, reference and memory. Accumulating antiques, commissioning crafts, designing new pieces that might be mid-century or 19th century, putting things in vitrines and layering gilt-framed landscapes over 17th-century tapestries, they have built a reputation as luxury’s default designers of atmosphere.
It makes sense then that they came together in the movies. Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch (there never was a Roman or a Williams) were both working on production design and on the films of Martin Scorsese when they met in the 1990s. The husband-and-wife team even set up their first studio on the Paramount lot in Hollywood before moving to New York in 2004. Having worked on Zoolander (yes, really) and Duplex, they were hired by actor-director Ben Stiller to design a new Hollywood home. Alesch’s astonishing drawings of a golden-age-of-cinema meets colonial-revival fantasia revealed a shift in scale and ambition. Their A-list career had launched.
I ask them about their beginnings in film and they are both, to my surprise, a little reticent. “The movies were very free,” Standefer says. “You could span different eras and styles and countries. You could move around in time.
“We’d be looking at houses for filming and you’d see something from the third century next to something from the 16th century and a painting from the 18th century. When did that stop?” she asks, rhetorically, I think. “We both grew up with film and TV,” she says, “and we saw those interiors expressing emotion, as part of the story.”
“It was a language that conveyed atmosphere and feeling,” adds Alesch. “You’d learn to communicate using ornament, scale, light and so on. The directors we worked with wanted the interiors to amplify the narrative and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since, amplifying through design. We’ve always been less focused on design than on storytelling.”
Apart from their interiors, seeped in moody light and rich in dark corners and shadowy potential, their main amplifier in recent years has been their SoHo store, Roman and Williams Guild. If you are the type of person who frequents design stores, as I once was, you will have become familiar with capacious, post-industrial spaces with acres of naked concrete studded with the overfamiliar roster of famous chairs and silly lights by a small number of big brands. This is not that.
For a start, the store hits the street as a restaurant, outdoor seating for their French bistro La Mercerie festooned with greenery, flowers and fairy lights at the corner of Howard and Mercer streets. Walk inside and you’ll find exquisite Edwardian vitrines stuffed full of delicate pots by contemporary makers, chunky furniture that looks like it has escaped from an expensive Aspen chalet and dense tablescapes suggesting the classy dinners you might be able to host if only you had two or three hundred separate items of domestic kit, from handblown glasses to gold-trimmed scalloped bowls.
It could have been a mess. Instead, it is a joyous scrum of styles and materials, young designers and craftspeople and Alesch’s own exuberantly handmade and seemingly axe-hewn works. (“Leaving something raw,” he says, “is so important.”)
“In most design stores,” Standefer says, “the austerity is deafening. We wanted an experience of a table that made you feel at home. People told us, ‘You can’t put a restaurant out front of a design store like that’, but the dishes we sell are used in the service, people enjoy them and ask about them. We liked the idea that you could touch these things, [like] the handmade glasses, and then you can wander through the store with a glass of wine.
“A home is never finished,” she says. “You collect things over time and these things we sell are anti-disposability. Because they are beautiful, people keep them.”
One of the most intriguing aspects of Roman and Williams’ expanding universe (and perhaps why they have lasted well) is that there is really no signature style. Working with new furniture and antiques, in modern buildings and historic homes, designing new structures or lushly stuffing old ones, they can veer from West Coast minimalism (houses and Goop interiors for Gwyneth Paltrow) via post-industrial dining at New York’s Tin Building to stately home maximalism.
They have no trouble flitting from a neo-Deco loft or a neocolonial mansion to the British Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the Chicago Athletic Association, they made a macho gents’ club feel cool; and they are building hotels in San Francisco (an old Julia Morgan building once owned by William Randolph Hearst) and a brand-new building on Gramercy Park.
All this has made them a little hard to pin down and perhaps accounts for a certain level of condescension from the architectural establishment. I ask Alesch about this and he agrees. “I think that’s right . . . there is a sense in architecture that if you allow a bit of this kind of work the whole [thing will] somehow turn Victorian.
“When we designed Elizabeth Street [an Art Deco block], it asked the question, can you build something like this today? People said, ‘oh, it’s too difficult, too expensive, we haven’t got the skills’ . . . but we did it and I know it has made an impact. Now there are a number of Art Deco buildings going up across the city.”
Alesch describes himself, slightly enigmatically, as a “soft architect”, one who is as interested in the tapestries and the drapes, the furniture and the books on the shelves as in the shell and the space. It’s a description that defies the usual parameters of architecture, going into the sphere of the private.
From the staff in their restaurant to the glasses on the table, to the drawings — Alesch creates traditional, handmade drawings that could easily be a century old but with which very few architects bother today — theirs is an idea of design as an enveloping atmosphere. It sounds a little superficial but it is also counter-intuitively profound, an idea that wraps around the user yet is rich enough and confident enough to allow them to change, supplement and customise it.
Theirs are interiors to spend time in, to relish. And they are based very much in the physical and the collaged layers of collection.
“If someone tells us that they’ve had a deeply memorable experience in one of our spaces,” Standefer tells me, “that, for me, is the best thing they could possibly say.”
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