← The Grand Tourist with Dan Rubinstein
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- [00:00]
Robin Standifer
Like I always tell the story of the Rizzoli book and Charles Myers, you know, our publisher, who's amazing, we wanted to put pictures in that had like the boom, boom, boom picture was on New Year's Eve and had balloons and half naked girls and like all kinds of wild business. And he's like interior books don't have these pictures. And I was like, but they should because the spaces, it looks like everyone's dead in every shelter magazine. Where are the people? Where's the life?
- [00:26]
Dan Rubenstein
Hi, I'm Dan Rubenstein and and this is the Grand Tourist. I've been a design journalist for more than 20 years and this is my personalized guided tour through the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food and travel. All the elements of a well lived life. Sometimes in the world of design, projects don't just make a statement, but ship the culture in unexpected ways. It's a bit like the so called butterfly effect where in some sci fi time traveling epic, someone steps on a bug 1 million years ago and all of history shifts to create a radically transformed present day. My guests today, through their rich, tactile and considered work, have made tidal wave changes to the aesthetics of the present through their products, hotels, restaurants and exhibitions. Robin Standifer and Steven Alish of the firm Roman and Williams partners in life as well as work. The two met working in the world of film, behind the scenes and after created homes for some choice celebrity clients. They eventually set out on their own to bring a soulful handcrafted ethos to the real life interiors world when it may not have been as much of a buzzword as it is today. To me, their first major impact on design came into shape with their hotel projects, two of which they worked on at about the same time, including the original Ace Hotel in New York. Not only did its design make waves, but how it was used became a whole new way of thinking about hospitality. And the rooftop club created for the other hotel that I mentioned. That would be the now legendary Boom boom room at the Standard Hotel on Manhattan's west side. Which is now shorthand for nothing less than a really great time. Roman and Williams has gone on to create spaces around the world from Tokyo and London to Istanbul and Miami. No matter the destination, they always bring their opulent a game signature. The Financial Times called them luxury's default designers of atmosphere. And since the firm's inception, their presence has been felt more than most masters of mood. Indeed, Robin and Stephen could probably just have made incredible hotels, restaurants and private clubs forever with some other high profile work sprinkled in, like the redo of the British galleries at New York's Met Museum or their private client work for the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and others. But around 2017, they started a journey into retail called Roman and Williams Guild that became a major success and later spawned a sister art gallery called Guild Gallery that champions the duo's favorite talents with a special emphasis on earthbound materials like ceramics and glass. Of course, they're not stopping there. The pair is now venturing into the world of lighting, which we'll speak about. I caught up with Robin and Stephen from their house in Montauk to discuss their contrasting backgrounds and how the two met, how their hotels shifted the conversation, their creative process, how Ben Stiller factors into everything and much more. Thank you guys for doing this and for joining me today, and I'm so thrilled to talk to both of you, But I kind of want to start at the beginning because of course I know you're an incredible firm and many of the things that you've done. And Robin, I believe you grew up in New York and Stephen, you in la. And I'm kind of wondering what each of you, what kind of memories sort of define your early life? Stephen, let's start with you.
- [03:46]
Steven Alish
Well, hey, I was actually born in Wisconsin and kind of grew up really early years in Milwaukee in this sort of inner city Milwaukee in the 70s. And in third grade, I think it was the summer between second and third or sometime it was kind of foggy. My mom packed us up and we moved to California, 1973. I had two brothers, I'm one of three brothers. And she just left on her own, no dad. And we moved to the hills of California, which was pretty fun at that age. I was pretty happy. My brothers too, we loved it. We had beautiful house up in the mountains, kind of Malibu canyon, the sort of hippie hills I call them, because my mom sort of fell into the New age movement at the time, vegetarianism and meditation. And so she said, let's get out of Wisconsin. Hot dogs and factories and cigarettes, unhealthy living, drinking beer. And California was just like land of health food. Carob grew our hair long, just became free spirited, kind of hippie kids. It was fantastic. Started surfing at that time.
- [04:59]
Dan Rubenstein
Okay, do you still surf today?
- [05:00]
Steven Alish
Yeah, I still surf. Still love it. It's a big part of my life. And one of the reasons we went to, came to Montauk was just because of the waves. And sometimes Montauk has a little bit of a California vibe. If you really kind of squint your eyes and kind of ignore certain things. It feels a little bit like Central California sometimes when you're on the hills and cliffs and the waves are great and not as many surfers as California, so it's pretty nice.
- [05:27]
Dan Rubenstein
And, Robin, what about you? Are you a New York kid?
- [05:30]
Robin Standifer
Yes, I'm a New York kid. Although I love hearing Stephen's story because I was always fascinated by California and Californians, as many New Yorkers are, whether they want to admit it or not. And that sort of brought us together. But I did grow up in New York, born and raised a couple of generations, and just was really drawn back there, which is why we still live there. My parents still live there. They're on the Upper east side now. They were on the Upper west side then. Just was a real city kid. I mean, school bus, subway, uptown, downtown. My uncle lived in the Village, so I loved being there. And even, you know, going to high school in Manhattan at Art and Design. So that was, you know, it's a very particular way to grow up because I think at a very young age, start to have kind of a connection to the city and an exposure to things. I don't think that it's very different, I think, than having a rural upbringing, you know, so just watching, like, the gallery scene and being 16 and meeting Basquiat and just that to me, and people are always like, ooh. But that was just normal. And New York was pretty gritty then and amazing, but such a kind of powerful stomping ground and so much going on. I remember being on the school bus and, you know, those are just city things that are very particular.
- [06:59]
Dan Rubenstein
And Stephen, like, being in la, was there a lot of, you know, did your family have any connections to the industry or to film or to Hollywood or anything like that?
- [07:08]
Steven Alish
Yeah, that's a great question. It's sort of natural, right? Living in Los Angeles area, where that's. You sort of stumble on it, because I remember as a kid, little kid, we would watch films, would come to the neighborhood down the street from our house. They would film, like Bionic man or different movies would show up, and I'd watch all the trucks and everything like that. But growing up, I started after high school, I went right into drafting in an architecture office, just with high school education, believe it or not. I was a really great draftsman. And just with a little roll of drawings, I got my first job really, really early. But I worked in film? No, I worked in architecture. Pretty much my 20s, pretty young. I think I was 19 when I started an office, but my father, my stepfather was a. Did still photography for feature films as a job. One of his many jobs, but that was one of them. And he had a couple friends who are art directors and things. And sort of in my late 20s, I was, to be honest, a little fatigued by architecture because I started so young, I think, like a Doogie Howser kind of situation. I was already tired of it. By 20, I don't know, seven, I was exhausted. 28. And film, kind of. My stepfather introduced me to an art director. I showed him my drawings and, you know, my architecture drawings. I do pretty serious working drawings in architecture, but I always did presentation drawings and sketches, too. I'm a really good quick sketcher. And that caught their eye. And they were like, you absolutely have the skills to work as a set designer and work with directors, sketching, you know, sketching with them in real time. And I packed my bags and just went on a wild film journey in my late, late 20s and did that for about 10 years. It's kind of a longer story, but.
- [09:04]
Dan Rubenstein
And, Robin, what about you? What was your first sort of entree to design and film?
- [09:10]
Robin Standifer
Well, I think that, you know, going back to the earlier question, this sort of. I mean, both Stephen and I have these really sort of counterculture hippie moms that were very independent and raised us in a way that was about being, you know, just very open, thinking that, you know, and believing we could do anything. And I think that's a great way to grow up. And so I think this sense of kind of artistic spirit in whatever it is. I mean, even to this day, I never think of design as having such a formal definition, but I think about it as part of curiosity and having an artistic spirit. So I don't totally know the answer. You know, I just. I was always interested in painting and drawing. I was always a sort of, you know, compulsive object collector. Whatever it was, I still am, you know, small and big. And so that, like, kind of lust and desire just led me down the road of art and fine art and trying to figure out how to turn that into something professional. But I think, you know, this, like a bookend of almost this whole interview. The idea of this sense of curiosity of making things and building things at whatever scale, kind of led me to film and to design and to.
- [10:37]
Dan Rubenstein
What was your first job?
- [10:38]
Robin Standifer
Well, my. Well, it's funny, I don't totally know the answer, but it might be. I was trying to think about this today, and this is just about getting older, so you don't remember everything first.
- [10:48]
Steven Alish
Your first film job, I think.
- [10:49]
Robin Standifer
Yeah, but my first job job job was a combination of working the DO at Castelli Gallery and working for Robert Lee Morris at Artwear, which, if people don't know, that was like the, like, epicenter of SoHo. There was all these crazy artists casting and making all this jewelry, and then Castelli represented like, everyone. And that those were my days. And it was really, you know, you just got exposure to such an incredible group of people, and there was just so much energy and creativity and. And film was a kind of a natural evolution of that. I mean, working in fine art and painting, somehow I knew that I actually wanted more. I think I was too interested in so many different arteries to want to just be singular and be just a painter or an artist in that sense. So film was the beginning of like kind of this wild Gesamtkunts were a collaboration, like, won everything. And so I was pretty young, I guess, just out of college, started to work on an independent film with a friend who was like, you know, why don't you work on a film and you do everything right? You like. I did wardrobe and I went to like a laundromat to wash people's clothes and made the sets. And it was just really invigorating and amazing. And I also loved. I loved the storytelling. I loved the idea that it was a combination of this creativity of making space and telling a story.
- [12:26]
Dan Rubenstein
And when did the first. When did the two of you first meet, Steven? Do you remember that day?
- [12:32]
Steven Alish
Yeah, the year gets a little fuzzy, but I was working in Los Angeles on films, you know, film after film. Right. It was just sort of a hot shot set designer, just, you know, take answering my answering machine at night after work and taking calls for next projects. Most of my film projects lasted from four to eight weeks. You know, I'd be on a gig way before shooting, right. I was never around during shooting because I was doing the prep for it. But I was working on a project called Cabin Boy, drawing a big boat in a soundstage. And the same person, Mark Zulski, who had originally got me my first film project, my stepfather's close friend, he says, hey, there's this production designer from New York in town. She's looking for somebody to come and do some sketches and draw. But you have to meet her at night. You have to meet her at like 7pm and I was like, that's fine. I loved Moonlighting. So I was working in Valencia, which is like an hour outside of la, and then Driving. I had to drive into Hollywood to this location where this so called New York production designer, that's all he really told me. He said she was intense, but I was kind of excited. I loved New Yorkers and there wasn't a lot of them in my life at that time. But they were like a kind of exotic animal, you know. And I went to this little funny junkie office in Hollywood. It was a low budget film. I was working on kind of big budget stuff. So I was a little spoiled. But I go to this small little office, but it was just so cute, this office, because it was just like desks all over the place. And then Robin had made a little corner office that was just decorated really beautifully with like drapery and vintage lamps and stacks and stacks of books. But she wasn't there. She was super late. She was like an hour and a half late. And I sat in this little room, this beautiful little room. I was kind of fine because it was like seven, eight o'clock and I just was flicking through all these World of Interiors. It's when I discovered World of Interiors that while I sat there that hour and a half, and I'll never forget it because I was looking through these things like it was like eye candy. Like I'd never seen anything like this before. I'm like, oh my God, it's like a research bible. And this room is so beautiful. Then she comes storming in, a small girl, like black hair, like very gothic, kind of New York gothic, kind of energetic, very pretty, super smart. I was just like, oh my God, you know, who's this? Who is this? And so we spent like a couple of weeks together, working at night, sketching, bonding, talking about everything. It was a really amazing experience. And it was a movie called the New Age, ironically enough. We were working on a set of a store. It was kind of a funny thing on Robertson Boulevard, if you know la. We took an empty space and I did sketches for this really highly developed, very intense lifestyle store for the. For the background of the movie called the New Age, Kind of a dark story. Michael Tolkien was the director, but that was sort of our bonding moment. It was a couple of weeks together and then we said goodbye. But we both had complicated lives and relationships and things like that. So it was really a professional relationship. But we were definitely checking each other out in a serious way. She was a little over my head because she was so smart and so mature. And she lied about her age too, because we were both in our late 20s. But she said she was like 35 or something. I was like, geez, you know. And you're.
- [16:05]
Dan Rubenstein
Oh, she told you she was older.
- [16:07]
Robin Standifer
I had to do that to get the job because I wanted a production design. You know, I. It was just such an amazing day. You know, I'd been working with Scorsese, which was incredible. When you did film in New York, you know, I went from, as I said, I did that short film and I got some work with him, which was phenomenal and being around all these amazing people. But I really, you know, wanted. I kind of missed, strangely enough, these low budget movies because you got to kind of do everything and make everything now. And also, even though working with Marty was incredible, this sort of. There was always an aspiration to kind of go to California. So first of all, of course I came. I was in New York City, I didn't drive, so I had to get a driver's license. That was hard enough, right? And then to be able to production design, you had to sit with all these like cigar smoking dudes, like, and tell them that you could design this movie. Which I knew I could do, but, you know, and I had a great head for assemblage and putting spaces together, but I didn't draw. And so, I mean, I can, you know, paint and do watercolors, but in a really, like, rudimentary way. Like, not in an extraordinary way, like Steven. So I go to California and I pitch for this job and I get it. Nick Wexler, who produced Drugstore Cowboy, was an incredible guy and just believed in me. And he was this kind of person who was really open to younger people. And I always looked a little younger. I'm kind of small. Like, I was always the shortest person in the class. So I was like, okay, I have to lie about my age. Which of course, 10 years later I was like, this is a bad idea. I have to stop. So Steve and I were together for like four years and I was like, oh my God, on my birthday, now I have to tell him how old I really am because I'm going to stay with this guy and this is not going to be good. So anyway, we had this office. It was next to Pink's hot dogs. I had a giant Ford Granada that I was terrified to drive and a brick phone. And this was California for me. And the California I imagined was surfers and. And meadows and just this California of my dreams that then in walked Stephen that he. I didn't even know, but I somehow sensed it that he represented that. And so he was there sitting in my office Totally adorable. The first thing I saw was this beautiful spread collar shirt and these perfect, weird boots, like, worn in perfectly. And I was like, okay, who is that? And then he just opened this portfolio of drawings. And I just will never to this day forget them. I was so moved because I've always been really enamored with just sort of. Just that level of traditional technique and artistic skill. It's still a fundamental of the guild in everything we do. And there's still. I'm allowed to say this. I'm his business partner, his wife. But just. There's just maybe, like, I don't know, three people on earth who have a hand like Steven's. And to be able. Walking into that room and seeing those drawings, it was a seminal moment, my life. And we did. We had complicated lives, but it was almost beyond that. It was about this artistic connectivity. And. I don't know, the rest is history. We started to work together.
- [19:28]
Steven Alish
I think I took you to the beach or hiking. I was never really at Los Angeleno because it was too concrete for me. I had a Jeep or something, and I was just sort of country style. It was kind of my thing, carrying around wildflowers and stuff like that. Dried flowers in the car, you know what I mean? And Robin was really. She came up to my apartment and there's just like, flowers everywhere and, you know, drawings of flowers and drawings of plants. And she loved that so much. And we kind of bonded over. We bonded over pods. Pods. We were big on pods. Like, we would go pod collecting. Yeah. Pea pods. Any kind of wood. Big wood pods from. Our favorite pod was from this one tree called the bottle tree. The Australian bottle tree, not the bottle brush tree, but it's called a bottle tree. It's got these giant, woody, woody pods. And there was. 11th street in Santa Monica, had 10 of these trees. And they're kind of low, hanging down. And we went and collected them. And she's just going nuts about the architecture of these pods. And then just to kind of play her, I would do a. You know, the next day I'd show up with a drawing of the pods, give it to her, you know, Or a watercolor of the pods.
- [20:35]
Dan Rubenstein
Suave.
- [20:35]
Steven Alish
And just. That was sort of pod flirting.
- [20:38]
Robin Standifer
Pod flirting. That's it. This is the. This is basically the basis of the relationship. I remember I still have the pods. And you would give them drawings.
- [20:48]
Steven Alish
Birthday present. You'd give me, like a giant pod, you know?
- [20:50]
Robin Standifer
Yeah. I would press a lily flower from a walk we took. It was just. It was all that and, you know, I.
- [20:58]
Dan Rubenstein
It's like the history of a costume.
- [20:59]
Robin Standifer
Drama or like a romance, a really pretty romantic attitude, you know, very focused on nature. And I. I always had this sort of, again, love and devotion to nature. I grew up in New York City, so it was really nature culture. So I found that through, you know, paintings at the Met or stuff at the drawing center, like drawings I got to see or objects, sculpture. But not, you know, Louise Bourgeois. Right. But not really experiencing it to that degree. You know, I mean, you know, like, look, we garden a lot now. I mean, Steven sometimes makes the joke. I'll make it for him. Like, I. The first carrot I ever saw was at. Thank you, honey. The first carrot I ever saw, you know, was at Fairway. I thought that that's where they came from. Like, I really.
- [21:51]
Steven Alish
No, the funniest thing is when we were early gardening, I pulled a carrot out one day from the ground, and she looked, like, astonished. She was like, what the hell? And I was like, what? It's a carrot. She's like, I didn't know that they grew up underground. And I thought it was just. I thought it was the cutest thing I've ever heard in my entire life, you know, because it's like, you don't really know when you're going to the grocery store, right? You're not growing, pulling carrots out. She's like, I thought there was a carrot bush. Maybe it was just this beautiful bush that these orange things grew on it.
- [22:19]
Dan Rubenstein
Oh, no. I was just going to say. And the jump to residential design and the jump outside of the film industry started with a particular house you guys worked on together.
- [22:30]
Steven Alish
Is that true? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was. It was a. We didn't know it was our last film, actually. We were on a film called Duplex in Los Angeles, which is an amazing film set. Design wise. It was pretty amazing. I don't think the actual film did that well, but it's a little noisy. And Drew Barrymore, Ben Stiller buy a brownstone. And as they peel away a partition wall, they start to discover all of this, like. Like what it says in the script. It said pure architectural pornography, which translated to, like, elaborate Tiffany aesthetic movement, wall paneling, corbels, bracketing. They just peel away. They discover that they're living in this incredibly detailed brownstone. And they start getting really. What's. What's the term for it, Robert? They just start getting lusty to take on more. They want this next apartment above them. And they tried to try to get this old lady to Move out and take over. We built this whole set from scratch on a soundstage in la. And Ben Stiller was the actor and he wasn't a director. We knew him because we had done this sets design for Zoolander that he directed and starred in it. So we were actually kind of friends with him, like, first name basis. But he shows up today to shoot in this brownstone set that we made. We hadn't seen him for a year or so. And he walks in and he's like, what the heck is like, oh, my God, you guys have like lost your mind. Because he's like looking at all this carving. We had made fireplaces and plaster relief with peacocks and stained glass. And he was knocking on the wood, knocking on the plaster. Like, this set is more. I'll never forget it. He says, this set is more real than my house. My house is fake. My house is completely thin and fake. This is totally real. It was such an inversion of reality in the soundstage that day. And he's like, please come to my house this weekend. I want to show you how bad it is. He's like, I have Styrofoam crown molding in my house.
- [24:27]
Robin Standifer
And he did. This is what I mean about the building arts versus film. And this is about us also breaking the mold. We were like, wow, there's all these artisans. This is like, it's the 18th century. Let's use them to make architecture.
- [24:43]
Steven Alish
Yeah.
- [24:44]
Robin Standifer
And so, I mean, even incredible. Denise de Novi was a producer, came and said, you guys should do this in reality and go on Stephen about Ben. Because the next step, for two years.
- [24:59]
Steven Alish
We basically redid his whole property and whole house, did additions. But we used. We used a lot of film carpenters. We used this crew. We used the Disney wood shop for all of our carvings. Because these Disney guys, we could take a 12 by 1210 foot long piece of old growth oak, give it to these guys, and they would spin it into a column. In a matter of hours, we built like 40 of these columns and bring them to Ben's house and install them down a beautiful arcade. Stuff that like the normal construction guys were like, they didn't even know how to do that. They didn't know how to spin a giant post with a lathe. They were like, they were going to go get us. They were going to go buy a Chatsworth fiberglass column down at the 1-800-columns. But we were just doing this stuff from scratch and we had all this kind of manpower to do it and sort of naiveness about it. I mean, I had my architecture background from those years before, so I knew how to put drawings together and get permits and all this stuff like this. I just knew this. I knew the building department like the back of my hand. I was like, oh, I could go get permits for everything. Did the drawings for those, got the permits, and then we supervised construction on his site for two years. And that was photographed for House and Garden. Robin was it. HG did a piece on it, Altacor maybe.
- [26:18]
Dan Rubenstein
And when it comes to like your first, you break out on your own. You're, you've got your new firm, you've got a couple of amazing projects under your belt. What were those first, you know, five to 10 years, like in the firm. Like what were some of those.
- [26:31]
Steven Alish
Kind of a quick ramp up. There was a period we left LA because we found ourselves doing these celebrity homes. We did a couple, we did a project for Davis Guggenheim and his wife Elizabeth Shue, and she was an actress. And at Venice we did a place for them. And so we found ourselves, we were pretty happy with this celebrity clientele in la. We were like, whoa, this was quick. But we were a little tired of LA at the same time. I kind of wanted. I had moved to New York in 95. I didn't ever mean to come back. Robin didn't drive. She was like, we gotta go back. So we go back to New York, we take an office. But we're working LA projects in New York, right? We had nothing in New York for a couple of years. We were doing the smallest renovations. I mean, I have elaborate renderings of a four foot wide kitchen renovation for somebody in an apartment.
- [27:20]
Robin Standifer
Like we were, oh, total hustle, like out of our living room. We first didn't take the office. We were like, this isn't going to work. Like we couldn't afford to get our car back from California. Like it was, you know, but you just, you know, you stick it out.
- [27:37]
Steven Alish
Yeah, we just do it in small apartment renovations. Really, really small. But strangely enough, we took this office. It was a little over our head rent wise, but we took it and we had a opening party. Robin, Robyn, loves to throws a really good party. She always puts a lot into it. So it was like elaborate party. We just invited everybody we do in New York and, and one of the people who came to the party, believe it or not, was Andre Balaz, who we didn't know, but we loved the Chateau of Marmont. We hung out there constantly in la. He was a bit of an enigma, mystery to us. We used to see him walk by once in a while. But we never talked to him.
- [28:13]
Robin Standifer
And we knew Griffin. Griffin Dunn, who introduced him.
- [28:15]
Steven Alish
Griffin Dunn invited him. Yeah. And we knew Griffin a little bit pretty well. And. But Andre shows up to the party and he's. And he says hello really gently to us. And. And he loved our office. He loved our office. And he specifically loved, strangely enough, he's like, whose paintings are those in that back office? And I'm like, oh, those are my paintings. And he goes, really hauntingly beautiful. He said. And the paintings were of stars. I do love these black paintings with stars. And underneath the painting, in kind of a stencil font, I wrote Infinite Tedium beneath this painting. I think I maybe put it in Latin. It was like tedium infinitium or something like this. Pretentious. But anyways, Andre was taken by this. And it always struck me that he just loved this. I think another painting was Tireless Star. I had this idea of the star that never gives up. And a couple days later, after this party, we get a phone call. And again, we're doing the smallest projects and it's someone, Andre's assistant, saying, andre wants to meet you to talk about something. And we're like, what could that be? And a couple days later we go to a meeting and it's Andre at his office. Fancy. And he sits us down and he says, I'm looking for someone to be my partner at the Standard Hotel. A new ground up Standard hotel on the west side Highway. The west side one. The big ground up thing.
- [29:43]
Robin Standifer
High Line. Yeah.
- [29:44]
Steven Alish
And we had no hotel experience. Right. But he was like. He just saw that. I think he saw it as like this sort of vehicle that he was going to drive to success with that hotel because of our tirelessness and both of our skill sets. He loved my drawings, but he loved Robin's energy. And did he give you a brief.
- [30:05]
Dan Rubenstein
Or anything like that?
- [30:05]
Steven Alish
Did he say, oh, yeah, we went to Los Angeles. We went on a tour of the LA ones with him. We have definitely a brief. Andre's very big brief, very hands on. And I mean, Andre, as I'm drawing a line on a piece of paper, Andre's following it with his eyes. You know what I mean? Like, where are you going to go next? I mean, we spent days and days and days with him. We became close friends. I mean, we would go to his apartment with drawings, draw, draw, draw, sketch after sketch, redo everything over and over again. I remember drawing floor plans on the Standard after, like the third or fourth floor plan of the Ground floor lobby. I was like, is this anywhere near approved, Andre? You know, and he's like, approved? What do you mean approved? I said, well, we're just trying to get approval to like move to the next step. And he was like, I don't think it'll ever be approved. You know, he just looked at me with these kind of his mischievous eyes.
- [30:59]
Dan Rubenstein
Yes.
- [31:00]
Steven Alish
Andre never approved anything. It was always a work in progress, always be better. I mean, the guy is tireless. Just like the thing. Tireless star, infinite tedium. He will work and work and work at perfecting something, you know, but just.
- [31:16]
Robin Standifer
Believes that something's never finished. And at the same time we were doing the Standard, we were working on his house.
- [31:22]
Dan Rubenstein
Right.
- [31:22]
Robin Standifer
In Rhinebeck. Yeah. So we were doing both together. And it was sort of interesting working on. I mean like even that started with Ben working on Juplex, working on a movie and working on his home. So we started to get in these very interesting.
- [31:36]
Steven Alish
We tend to bond with our clients pretty.
- [31:38]
Robin Standifer
Yeah, intensively.
- [31:40]
Dan Rubenstein
And what do you think that the, like the Standard was a big hit. So like, what do you think from a hotel point of view, like from a hospitality travel universe point of view, like, what did people kind of tell you they loved about the hotel?
- [31:54]
Robin Standifer
Well, something very funny happened, which is that, you know, and I think, you know, this and even was we were working on Ace and the Standard at the same time. So I think that there's something important to that part of the story because the fact is that the Standard was for a certain kind of cultural community and the Ace was for a different cultural community. So what people loved about the Boom Boom Room or the Standard Grill was kind of the opposite about what they loved about the Breslin or the Ace lobby. And we had this moment of kind of eureka. Recognition that we were kind of more ethos than style, that we just wanted to play with our ideas about experience and culture. Like, you know, like Steve always said.
- [32:39]
Steven Alish
Disco. Yeah, we always said. I mean the Standard was like sort of Gucci. The Standard was Derek Zoolander and the frickin Ace was Hansel. If you're. If you're a Zoolander fan. I mean it's. We're talking about dirt. The Ace could easily have had a dirt room in it, right? Could it not have. It had a dirt room somewhere.
- [32:55]
Robin Standifer
100%. It should have.
- [32:57]
Dan Rubenstein
Derelict, if I'm remembering the film correctly.
- [33:01]
Steven Alish
Yeah, yeah. And then of course, you know, the Standard is just like. It's Andre's. Andre embodied. Right. Good looking, sexy. Right. I mean, that's the side of us that we have that little side. We love that side. And then the Ace was sort of like punk, a little, like urchiny, kind of bratty. We have that side too, and so we loved it. And of course, they're kind of like mortal enemies, you know, Alex Calderwood and Andre Belaz. It was almost like a comic book, like Batman vs. Penguin.
- [33:30]
Dan Rubenstein
Were they, like, annoyed that you were working on the other while you were.
- [33:33]
Steven Alish
Working on the other? Yes, for sure. It definitely caused friction. Andre was hurt by it. Ace was a fast project, maybe one or two years. Design process and build. It was quick. Standard was six or seven years of.
- [33:44]
Robin Standifer
Hard work because it was ground up.
- [33:46]
Steven Alish
So it wasn't the whole job. It was like the last year. But it hurt. It hurt Andre's feelings. He felt didn't like it. We got pushed out a lot of the media and press at the end of the job because of it. So it hurt. Made us feel bad too, because we put so much into it and we learned so much from him. But I think five, 10 years later, we regrouped and became friends again. Internship for his daughter at our office. And he's still one of our close, close friends. We love seeing him and haven't worked on anything since then, but he's still a dear friend. And it all worked out on the end. And I think. I think they really sapped. They never fought for the same customer. And I think it was really apparent that there are totally different brands, you know?
- [34:28]
Dan Rubenstein
You know, I guess maybe because I think my office was near the Ace at the time. That to me, you know, and I was maybe the right demographic. And, you know, to me, the Ace kind of changed the way that hotels are kind of used and designed, and people didn't just. It wasn't just a place to sleep. It was a place to hang out. People brought their laptops, they did meetings there. It was kind of like an early place where that kind of third. The quote unquote, third place started to come into being.
- [34:58]
Robin Standifer
Oh, it was groundbreaking, for sure. I mean, the Standard was amazing. People love the boomboom. They still do. So that was like just an incredible space. But it's not like that was outside of a typology that we understand the Ace, we broke the mold, and Alex had that vision. And then this goes back a little bit to talking about Stephen's kind of California background, because it was a lot East Coast, west coast. And that was about the east, the west coast kind of just casual, like, ability to just be light Hearted about bringing things together and an east coast kind of punkness. And those two things at ACE came together, and we loved Alex and we were very close. And Alex passed away, which still is painful to me to this day. And we wanted to create a hotel that was. Just Create a new definition. And it was that table that we made with plugs for laptops, because laptops were a new invention. And so all of that, it was about also the fluidity of work and eating.
- [36:12]
Steven Alish
Remember that, too. We all agreed on it. It was like, where money was. Money changing hands, was not a heavy principle. Like, say, like a W hotel or something where it's all about selling beverages in the lobby. I mean, the ace, of course, had to. Had to make a profit. But Alex's philosophy was about generosity. And you could camp out in that lobby and not really be told to leave or, hey, you got to order something if you're going to sit here. It wasn't allowed. I think that's a very West Coast Portland style of generosity that he had and wanted. Designed to be very comfortable, where you could just camp out but feel no pressure to have to eat or. Or drink the whole time.
- [36:57]
Robin Standifer
But a real definition of hospitality, right? Like a true definition. A clubhouse. Like, just come hang out, a commune. Talk about, like, we all had kind of bohemian families and sort of forged our own path. So ACE felt very comfortable in that way. I mean, you know, I sourced all vintage furniture, and it was like, let's be Inspired by Alexander McQueen and Stephen. Like, painted on top of a wing chair, like in spray paint on plaid. And we were just really loose and spontaneous, and everybody was on the team. And specifically, you know, Alex had a great team, but me, Steven and Alex were just. Wade was amazing, just said, okay, a hotel doesn't have to be what you think it is, you know, and then doesn't have to be, like the history of the Ritz, which is amazing. But can't there be a new approach to what hospitality in a hotel is for a new generation? And it was. But just remember when it first opened, Dan, there were tumbleweeds. I was, like, laying there on that sofa. Days, like that suede sofa that looked like Jim Morrison's pants. And I was like, okay, no one is ever going to come here. This was a cool, weird idea. And this is going to be our clubhouse. Forget it. And then suddenly, couple months. Oh, slow, long months. Many of them.
- [38:27]
Steven Alish
The neighborhood was so quiet at night, right?
- [38:29]
Dan Rubenstein
Yeah, definitely. It definitely was also, like the kind of core of a new neighborhood, too, for a While that kind of became the sun to which everything was kind of revolving around. And there was a restaurant and there was a shop, and there was things.
- [38:43]
Robin Standifer
Around the neighborhood, but it took time. So you have to take that kind of risk to break ground to, you know, create a new idea. Like, it just.
- [38:52]
Steven Alish
You.
- [38:52]
Robin Standifer
You have to be brave. Do you know what I mean? You have to, like, stick to your guns. And we were. It was a great team to do that. And we started, like, even for the rooms, designing all the furniture, playing with it in plywood. You know, just. It was a lot of invention, having artists, finding artists, giving them 300 bucks to do a different piece of art in every room. We folded up canvas and sent them to them. And. And Stephen made this kind of track in the room that had pegs and holes for the art to hang on. And so it was just really about just like, forging your own path and doing everything and having a community of people doing things on their own terms. And then even we were in the lobby, and a bunch of folks from Facebook were like, this is outrageous. Do stuff for us. And so that started a new thread in our career.
- [39:43]
Steven Alish
Yeah.
- [39:43]
Dan Rubenstein
And when it comes to the boomboom room is kind of this, you know, super successful, you know, why do you think it was so successful? What about the design of that?
- [39:51]
Steven Alish
I know the boom rooftop.
- [39:53]
Dan Rubenstein
People that don't know it's a kind of a rooftop space surrounded by windows with this incredible bar, and there's this amazing column in the center. I'm kind of oversimplifying, but, I mean, it was hugely successful.
- [40:04]
Robin Standifer
No, but the boom boom is glamorous.
- [40:07]
Steven Alish
I think it's rooted in. It's. I'd like. Maybe it's because I think of architecture, interior architecture, as sort of the most important thing. I think it's power and beauty, is because of its interior architecture, which I exercised, like, every bit of strength I had to draw that room up. And that room is based on a lot of research. But some of the research was from the first architecture project, architecture job I had back in the 80s. The first person I worked for was a guy named Bahram Nashat, Iranian architect who had just come over from Tehran during the revolution. And he was a hotshot kind of Tehranian architect who worked for the rich people of Tehran. And one of the first projects I worked on was Prince Reza's house with this architect. I was a little kid. I was a kid, right? And I'm drawing these plans for this Prince Reza's house in Virginia, which had waterfalls in it and disco clubs and three story fireplaces. I mean, the whole thing was like, if you can imagine Iranian modernism back in the 70s, 80s, and was pretty intense. Well, I would say 80s. Well, by 80s it ended, but 60s, 70s, 80s, Tehran was really, like, kind of intense, architecturally, very experimental and things like this. But I was drawing all these floor plans and details for that house, and I saw the house go up. We saw a couple houses go up in California with him. And so my skills with this modernist, curving, bending architecture, the trees, the wrapped columns, came from Bahram. And what I learned at that office at such a young age. And Andre was just blown away as we did sketches and prototypes and built samples of things. He was just like, you never saw a happier person in the world. He was like, yes, that's.
- [42:01]
Robin Standifer
And he loved. And he loved the references to nature. Cause Stephen and I really didn't want to use too much research. That was other people's work. So between Stephen's history of working on this really curvaceous, sinewy architecture coming from kind of 70s, you know, Tehran and us looking at, like, trees and lays of rivers and thinking of the floor plan and the way that it was really like a forest. And so, you know, like, we. And then so again, nature culture. Andre's brief was, it's a Bentley covered in honey. And then we added like, okay, and the Bentley, like, morphs into some secret garden because that tree in the middle and all those shapes in that very geometric kind of austere building, that combination, that tension, I think, was very strong. I think that was very unexpected. When people got up there, they were like, are we in this magical tree house? Are we in this natural, dreamy, just caramel world over New York City being, you know, even us picking that beautiful, shiny alder and sensual white leather. Just really fun.
- [43:17]
Dan Rubenstein
And there was a profile of you guys in the FT that kind of called you the luxury's default designers of atmosphere. And I was wondering if you could define what the Roman and Williams Atmosphere.
- [43:29]
Steven Alish
I like that. I thought that was a nice title, right? I was like, wow, that's cool.
- [43:33]
Robin Standifer
This idea of layers of atmosphere. I mean, I think that, again, comes from sort of the senses, right? We've always loved that. What a place smelled like, what it sounded like. It was never just this inanimate design. Like, I always tell the story of the Rizzoli book and Charles Myers, you know, our publisher, who's amazing. We wanted to put pictures in that had, like, the boom, boom, boom. Picture was on New Year's Eve and had balloons and half naked girls and like, all kinds of wild business. And he's like, interior books don't have these pictures. And I was like, but they should, because the spaces. It looks like everyone's dead in every shelter magazine. Where are the people? Where's the life? And even when Steve and I, whatever we're making, we want it to be active and animate. And I think that that's a lot of what that article. I mean, you know, we did an interview for it, but that is just sort of about this sense of atmosphere, which is somewhat unclassifiable. It's not just about the sofa and the beautiful wall. And I don't discount that. But when something really is remarkable, it's when it is alive.
- [44:46]
Steven Alish
I keep thinking of the word haunting as a word that I keep coming back to. And haunting has connotations of like a haunted house, right? But if you think about the word haunting, it is kind of funny. But I love to think of, like, what is a haunting sandwich, for example, or a haunting cup of coffee. That cup of coffee is hauntingly good. Or that sandwich is hauntingly delicious. It means that it's like something about it just stayed with you. Like, it was like you ate this sandwich and you were like, oh, my God, like the bread, the cheese, the herbs in it, right? This hauntingly good. It was like the love put into that and that. So that word comes up to me. For a room, of course, that's haunting. A hauntingly beautiful experience of someone who's hauntingly beautiful. These are just. I think it's such a great word that has no connotations of, like, spookiness when I. When I use it, it just means it stays with you, and that's that. I tell you, there is no formula for being haunting. And I do not even think. I actually think it is taboo to want to be haunting because it almost will curse you and you won't be haunting if you try to be haunting. But I think our goal is to have a haunting after feeling for something that we do, whether it is a part of it.
- [46:02]
Robin Standifer
Well, to get in your head. And that goes back to this idea about being unclassifiable. Like, we've always never wanted to be able to have someone put their finger on something. And I think a powerful, haunting memory is about that. Like, how did. How did that space make you feel? Like, I can't even tell you. It just got, like, into my blood. And Stephen and I have a fascination with that with, like, people will sometimes stop us and having been to certain spaces and say, it just got to me, and they can't even. It becomes a little indescribable. And that is, I think, connects to this idea about the atmosphere. Something's in the air that you can't quite define that moves you.
- [46:49]
Steven Alish
And that's, for us, the big part of that is not just design, but like Robin said, it's music. It's also the service. So when it works well for us, the places are managed well and the staff is really done well. Like, Andre is really good at that with Chiltern. If you ever go to the Chiltern firehouse, the staffing, the back and forth, that conversation with people is always really great because he's so interested in that.
- [47:10]
Robin Standifer
But Maison Estelle, I mean, which you've been to Dan, like, that has that. And even us playing with this, finally kind of digging in. I mean, it's fun to work in England because you have these incredible historic buildings, and then you can layer things from so many different periods. And we love to kind of master that mix to not. You know what I mean, just to be interested in collecting and making things and that you can again, put your finger on when any of them are from.
- [47:39]
Dan Rubenstein
And, you know, you guys, did you start with these homes? You have celebrity homes. Then you could have rested on your laurels and just done that. But then you started to do big, very popular hotels. And then at some point, you decide you're going to do Roman Williams Guild and launch into this whole other part of your business. Why do that? I mean, if you asked anybody, hey, I know what I'm going to do in New York in the 2010s, I'm going to open a restaurant and a retail location. Someone might be like, are you crazy? Why would the toughest businesses around. So why Dan?
- [48:16]
Robin Standifer
Just think about what we're talking about. We love Andre, we love Alex, Ben Stiller, Kate Hudson. We're still. And we're generous people. We're in service, right? You really are there to bring their dreams to life. Maybe we have a vision for how to do that, but you have to know your place in that, you know, and we say that even with the success we had, we're not arrogant about what that means. And at certain point we were like, okay, are we ever. We had a lot of vision for collections of our own furniture, our own lighting. We had a vision for working artisanally with people and curating in a way that we had the vision and ownership on our own terms. And we really couldn't do that. And we love the design practice and Roman Williams is so close to my heart. We still have the most incredible clients. We're back doing a lot of residential now as well, but the guild allowed us. We said, okay, if not now, when? You know, so when you take stock after a certain amount of years, right? We were getting, you know, what other 15 year mark, and we were like, okay, what is next? And people would ask us that. You're going to ask us that in a minute. Like, everybody asks that. And we were like, okay, a thousand year building. We want to build things to last. And I'm not being facetious saying that we care about those things deeply, but we thought, what means something in our souls? What do we need to do to know that we get to a certain point in our lives and we're just, you know, we did something that was really meaningful and we thought, okay, like, well, and I guess I want to back up because, you know, a lot of designers have collections of furniture and we did a beautiful collaboration with Waterworks with Peter Salak, that's still, you know, a best seller. And we're super proud of. And also was like the start of sort of the industrial fixture in the marketplace. And a lot of different companies, you pick them. You know, the names came to us and wanted us to sign licensing deals. And we just thought, you know, it's still not our own terms.
- [50:22]
Steven Alish
Yeah, we came close. We did some prototype work. We're doing prototypes with a group of people on a chair and there's 15 people in a room critiquing a chair and we're like, oh my God, you know, this is just driving us crazy. We could do it for the hotels, we could do it for our residents. But I don't want to do this for like an original chair. That has to, I have to say, comes from my heart when there's 15 people talking about it, you know. And so we came so close to signing on the dotted line with multiple companies, maybe three or four different companies. And at one point we just, we just put the pencil down and even Partners for a space. And we just said we started hunting for a, a space in the city and just got some investment from some of the people we had worked with, some people that we liked and liked us put together not that much money and had to sign a big lease. 15 year personal guarantee on a lease, which is pretty difficult.
- [51:21]
Robin Standifer
Terrifying.
- [51:22]
Steven Alish
Terrifying. But we actually love our landlord. Our landlord, though, has also become.
- [51:26]
Robin Standifer
He's like, yes, we love our landlord.
- [51:29]
Steven Alish
We like helping him with other spots in the neighborhood. And he's rented our office, new office to us. He's rented our art gallery to us. Now we've become pretty close to him and even his children.
- [51:40]
Robin Standifer
Alabaz. Amazing. I mean, because that's what, you know, that's kind of old school, right? It's like, okay, this person really supports you, wants to support us to building our own little world. And we wanted a big space because when people. I mean, even Gwyneth, whose house we did, she was like, oh, my God, this space is so big. But we just thought, you know what? Like, go big or go home. Like, we want a restaurant in it. We make a lot of different kinds of furniture. We have these. You know, our concept of our collections is really about a family tree. So we have different lights, and it's never kind of one style. So we needed a space that was big enough to be the home of all those things. And so, you know, we wanted to be owners. And then, you know, you fail or succeed on your own terms, right? Because you fail for someone else is always like, you know, who told you to do what? And you just are not. There's not the purity of what I want to make. Go ahead.
- [52:43]
Steven Alish
As a designer, sometimes it's difficult to walk through a hotel or a restaurant you worked on, and you see that the flowers are sort of half dead. Or you see plastic flowers in a vase were supposed to be real flowers. And you see the. Or you see the bar. At the bar, there's a bunch of plastic containers holding ice. You're like, oh, my God. You can't use plastic containers. And as a designer, you have no authority. Once you turn it over, the operators take over. They're like, who are you? We have to walk to projects, even into the Standard or the ace, where you're walking in a year later, you're saying, what? Everything's screwed up here. They're like, who are you? And you wouldn't even know the turnover for managers. And things are so high at these places, they don't even know you. And so, to be honest, it's very difficult to go through that as a designer. Home's different. You don't get invited to a home you worked on all the time, years and years. But people take better care of their homes, too. But I think opening the restaurant and the store gave us the opportunity to have that ownership of walking through and continuing to fix and improve. And we just love that. We love that daily maintenance. And it's something we've been thinking a Lot about with our projects is how we can make sure that we have that ownership continue after we. After the place opens up. How as a designer, you could still have authority to get your projects to function properly and be cared for properly. It's hard.
- [54:14]
Dan Rubenstein
And then at some point, you guys. I'm not sure how many years it's been now, but you have the Guild Gallery, which brings you into yet another world of the fine art gallery and that whole universe. And I know you guys have done.
- [54:27]
Steven Alish
Stuff with art fairs, Mini Met.
- [54:30]
Dan Rubenstein
Yeah, yeah. So you've gone from the Met to having your own gallery. And it's small.
- [54:34]
Steven Alish
It's small, but it's a good, cute practice gallery.
- [54:37]
Dan Rubenstein
Was there something like you felt like, wasn't fitting into the Guild, you know, to the store, and then you kind of said, this deserves its own space, and it kind of grew up.
- [54:45]
Robin Standifer
Yeah, well, during the pandemic, you know. Well, we've always had. I mean, this connects back to the Met, this fascination with clay and ceramics. And we loved this sense of ceramics being utilitarian. Right. The earliest ceramics. Right. Like, and, I mean, clay is sort of the most ancient fundamental material, and ceramics are the sort of earliest part of all our humanity. And there was just something always very powerful and moving about that. And most of the objects that were in the British galleries were ceramic. And so that connected us even to sort of representing, besides making our own collection, representing all these artists at the Guild. And then some of them were working at scale and started to work at a bigger scale. And it was clear, even as Stephen said, our gallery's little. But there was no way to put pieces of this scale in the Guild. And you couldn't really. I mean, the Guild is this eclectic crush. It's almost Hurstian. Right. And we love that about it. But there's some things that need serenity and singularity. And even as we were doing the Met, there's some things where it's like the teapot case is a big massing, and then there's other pieces that have a lot more airspace around them. And that syncopation, like in music, is very important. And the Guild Gallery was part of that. So it's like the syncopation of Canal street, right? You're in the intensity of the Guild, where you're buying dishes and glassware and a sofa and eating a chicken, and then you travel down the street to a very calm, serene, focused environment to look at a large ceramic chair. And so it was about that, you know, changing your perspective and perception of how you See something. And we wanted to play with that and to do that and to also give these artists another platform.
- [56:37]
Dan Rubenstein
And you know, when it comes to sort of ground up architecture, you've got since 2009. And I think that. Tell me a little bit about 211 Elizabeth Street. Tell me about this project and how.
- [56:53]
Steven Alish
That'S, that's an exciting part of our office. We've done. I think it's four buildings ground up buildings that we designed. I think we might be doing our fifth right now. They come, they come every couple of years and we're so grateful for the opportunity. But that was the first one. 211 Elizabeth. We're trying to figure the roots of it and I think it might come from the Standard. The Standard had a developer group. Dan Nideck is a developer on it, Dune Capital. And Dan and his team were always at every design meeting, kind of standing, sitting at the table, just watching, making sure everybody was like following the schedule. And a lot of people don't know this, but on the Standard, besides the interiors, we designed the exterior of the whole ground floor, all the brick buildings. On the ground floor where the restaurant is and the beer garden, there's a series of one story brick buildings with cornices and proper steel windows. Looks very, very meatpacking district. I think when the scaffolding came down and the hotel opened, people just thought they were new old buildings that had been renovated. But in fact they're brand new brick buildings. And again, just back to my architecture background. I'm pretty skilled with brick and how to do a traditional brick building. I could draw it like in my sleep. And Dan and his team saw that. And after the Standard, no, I think it was maybe during, but they bought a lot in Elizabeth to 11 Elizabeth. And they came to our office and said, would you like to do a ground up condominium project? And we were sure. Again, I did some really fast presentation drawings like overnight or something or over the weekend and blew them away at these big folks renderings. And brick by brick. We did put it all together and we did beautiful interiors with Peter Manning was the partner on the project and Peter was so supportive and just loved our personal style. So it was really a blessing.
- [58:55]
Dan Rubenstein
And what is your creative process like today? Who's doing what when you've got something on the boards, you know, what is that?
- [59:02]
Robin Standifer
Well, it's really. It depends on the what and what part of it. I mean I think that the architecture in terms of the buildings, that's really. I mean Steven has powerful ownership of that. Although we then Sometimes collaborate. Like, I can be a muse for him, he can be one for me. Do you know what I mean? And I will, you know, concept an interior, but sometimes say, push yourself about the material to use like, Fitzroy, let's use all terracotta. And then he sat down and drew like, literally a whole giant suite, which is a collection of moldings that were original for that building. And together we found a way to get them made. Although a terracotta building hadn't been made in New York City for many decades. So in that case, I kind of were for him supporting the sort of, sort of research of the materiality. And he's drawing on an interior. He'll help draw for me. Like when we started on the New Age, and he like drew these screens for me and we fell in love.
- [60:06]
Steven Alish
So it just, it really see our creative. Robin's doing it right now because she's really good at describing things. And I could do a beautiful drawing, say, of 211 Elizabeth street, right? Stay up all night and do this. Say two renderings, they go up on the wall. Say, I had to give the presentation. What I'm going to do is I'm going to walk up and say, have a look. These are my drawings. I hope you like them. You know, I like them. I hope you do. That's pretty much the end of the presentation. And I just expect them to speak for themselves, Right? And sadly, you know, sometimes they do, but most often they don't. And Robin will describe the drawings, the drawings right there. But she'll describe it like, she'll just begin, like the storytelling moment of like, what do we have here? Let's look at this. Let's look at this together and then take everybody on this one or two hour journey. And the people are just like melted, like puddles of like love puddles by the end of the thing. And she just has such a way with words and she'll do it with me even before I do the drawings too, to get me kind of charged up and optimistic and energized. She's really good at that and a great coach. She's got an amazing coaching ability. It's like a, like a Bill Belichick, like, run faster. Muddy. If it's muddy raining, you sprained ankle, just keep running like, like take you all the way. She's just really good at that.
- [61:26]
Dan Rubenstein
And can you remember a time where maybe you do a presentation and you totally bomb. And Robin comes in with an explanation that kind of clicks with people?
- [61:35]
Steven Alish
Oh, yeah, I don't know. It happens very rarely, but there's one or two times where she was busy and I had to give it a shot. It just does not go very well, or I don't know where you were not feeling well. And I did a couple people just. They become legendary, like laughing things. Like Stephen just said, I hope you like it, and sat back down. But it works really well together. But besides that presentation thing, Robin's ability to put together objects and research and weave things, like an editorial kind of eye is unmatched to this day. Even just arranging 15 objects on the table, it'll be a magical quality to it. That's a small example of it, but that leads to even buildings and massing, massing and choreography of a garden, of a room, of architecture. She's really got a great vision from small scale to a big scale. That's pretty astounding.
- [62:36]
Dan Rubenstein
And, Robin, if you could tell me a little bit about your. The new lighting collection that you guys are working on. It's called A Certain Slant of Light, if I may.
- [62:45]
Robin Standifer
Well, that's actually. Well, just. I don't want to correct you, but it's. That's. That's going to be. And you're going to come, Dan, it's in November. That's going to be kind of a happening. I mean, you know, lighting for us, we love making lighting. So to Steven's point, like, lighting is a perfect collaboration of what both of us are talking about, right. I love the atmosphere and some form. Stephen is so technical in his ability for just this sacred perfect geometry. And lights need all that attention to make a really special light is a very complicated and difficult thing to do because it really is industrial design. So we've always loved making light because, again, that creates layers of atmosphere. Like, one of the first things we do when we come home is turn on every light, which is like 100. And that takes a long time. And so at the Guild, again with the, you know, smell of the chicken and coffee and the whole collection, it's an immersive experience. But we thought, like, with the gallery, let's take the lights outside of that environment. And Stephen and I happened to find this incredible space in Tribeca, and we're going to take it over and put 100 lights in it. And that's going to be part of it, is launching a few new collections. And one, I mean, I didn't talk about this because Stephen really, like, when he talks about this, he is a very master builder. Like every prototype of every object we create, he makes. And that's something also now that is sort of very old world and very incredibly unusual. That skill set is so, so rare in this 21st century. And so, you know, we started to play with a lot of these things during the pandemic because we were kind of locked in Montauk. And a lot of those lines, these cast glass sconces and this cast glass collection, a beautiful kind of collection of seeds we call them, which are these. This blown glass with fluting in these beautiful forms. And so those will be the new lights that'll another sconce that's almost in a sense a machine age meets sort of early deco, that cusp, you know what I mean, where it's almost. It's pre industrial, right. So it's about sort of something beautiful but mechanical, something that feels like jewelry or an incredible microscope or, you know, parts of a beautiful boat, but not, you know, not quite that masculine. Where that masculine and feminine come together like plan forms meet pieces of industrial design. And so we've been experimenting with some of those things. And so this is going to be A Certain Slant of Light is an Emily Dickinson poem. And what that is about is because it's right around Stephen's birthday. So Stephen and I are kind of opposite ends of the zodiac. I'm May and he's November. So November is when the clocks change and we know what, right?
- [65:48]
Steven Alish
Yeah, I'm first freeze. She's last freeze, right. But also my birthday is that doomsday, like when the time changes. It's all of a sudden it's dark at 3:00. So this is an idea to take that time and maybe do something extraordinary at that dark time, which will also be election time. Well, who knows what's going to happen. But we're just trying to bring some light to that that time of the year and just do something sort of brilliant, illuminating, right? Try not to fall into cliches with lighting. But we just want to bring brighten up that time of the year, right.
- [66:24]
Robin Standifer
With this big exposition and start at 4:30. Because it's hard to imagine right now, right, Dan, like look outside that at 4:30 on the 14th of November it's dark. So, you know, so. And a certain slant of light again is a beautiful Emily Dickinson poem about that. Like that slant of light, which is evocative. It's sad, right, because all of a sudden the now she was from the northeast and the light is falling and darkening at an earlier hour. And so we're trying to extend that light a little with these hundred lights and Figuring out at, gosh, how to make it a happening. Just talking about getting a little insider about the design world. You know, first of all, when you go to salone or even fashion shows, there's off site events. And New York doesn't have a lot of off site events. And everybody loves to go to those off site events. And I thought, let Stephen and I thought, this is an incredible space, very classical space that is really mysterious. When you go in there, you are not going to, like, you don't know what is coming in. Tribeca. It's not industrial, it's really elegant, almost beaux artist. Yeah. Parisian. And putting all our lights, which are a combination of families and a combination of styles. And maybe, I mean, we're playing with the idea of this huge bench where you could lay down and just look up at all of them. And so we really haven't done something like this before. And we like experimenting kind of a risk.
- [67:56]
Steven Alish
But it's all basically the year's inventory being used and hung. So it's all very carefully installed because it's all for sale. It's all going to go back in boxes. And it's basically our inventory. So rather than sit in the warehouse protected, we're going to just use them for this exposition, which is kind of. That's again, our sort of experimental business mode. Whereas designers were kind of moving into other areas of operation. Like, how lonely are those lights in those boxes? Let's use them. Let's just be careful we don't dent them or lose screws.
- [68:30]
Robin Standifer
Yeah. But even just our theatrical background, like, we love to do film and even some theater. And so this is something a little theatrical, you know, playing with how the light rises and falls, allowing people to really focus and have this intense massing of all these lights. So for us, just there's something experimental about that. And we're constantly. That's our kind of mode of innovating.
- [68:56]
Dan Rubenstein
And what do you see beyond that? Like, how do you see the firm going in your own. You guys have done so much and it seems like you like to experiment with new things, which of course is incredible. And no missteps yet. So what's. Where do you guys. I'll ask you a little bit of a. Like a job interview question. Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
- [69:17]
Robin Standifer
I always ask that question. And you don't, like, I tell you, like, people struggle with that answer. So I don't know, Stephen. I just think it's like we have.
- [69:28]
Steven Alish
Multiple people irons in the fire. Is that what you say? I mean, I love to continue the slow, slow growth of a building every couple of years in the office. I just love that kind of the five year projects that take five years or so, maybe six sometimes, and just build it as a couple more buildings. It's so important to myself and even to a certain culture in our office of good architects. And that's one thing for sure. We're probably moving a little bit away from one off restaurants that we're not involved in the operations on because they're fun, they're exciting, they're kind of trendy. It's part of like sort of a contest of new ideas. But they're also just, I don't know, they're a pain in the butt sometimes. And I think we're kind of slowly.
- [70:18]
Robin Standifer
Stepping away from that realm of unless we own it. So we like more ownership and also just more building. Like there'll be more tables. Like it's things now. I mean, I say this with so humbly, things that excite us. So as long as we can like pay the rent and keep this going, you know, we just want to keep doing things that are inspiring. We rarely get bored because we don't let ourselves. So, you know, we're in Montauk a lot. Our laboratory's here. We're here now. And just the experimenting of that, experimenting with the gardens we're really into in this time in our lives, a lot of planting and gardening. And it's having just a very powerful impact on the things we make. And that synergy together is meaningful. And I hope that you know that's got another strong decade ahead of us because it's pretty satisfying.
- [71:13]
Steven Alish
Well, I know we have three acres of wildflower native gardens, but it's a lot of management, a lot of weeding. We're really involved in every inch of it. And it's just a big part of our lives right now. It's crazy too. It's just going off. It's like blowing up the garden flowers.
- [71:29]
Robin Standifer
You're not that far away, Dan. You have to come.
- [71:31]
Dan Rubenstein
That's true. I mean, no one's ever told me weeding was in their future, but I guess that's.
- [71:35]
Steven Alish
I love it. Yeah, well, it's what it's. It's about native. It's. It's interesting because it's. Our gardens have, after 10 years now, this meadow building. It's just. The diversity is just incredible. And in a funny way, we've actually learned to control it less. But there's certain invasive vines that are like really cruel to the other plants and just choke things out that were kind of police a little bit. But letting the natural seeds that are kind of landing in the yard grow are just random things. I mean, just we're like, really, we're like a little bit Darwinian, like naturalists walking around discovering new plants in our garden, like, every day.
- [72:14]
Dan Rubenstein
Thank you to my guests Robin and Stephen, as well as to Sarah Napkins for making this episode happen. The editor of the Grand Tourist is Stan Hall. To keep this going, don't forget to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter, the Grand Tourist curator@thegrandtourist.net and follow me on Instagram annrubenstein. And don't forget to follow the Grand Tourist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. And leave us a rating or comment. Every little bit helps. Till next time.