The Grand Tourist Introduces: Charlap Hyman & Herrero, Sophie Lou Jacobsen, BoND

TRANSCRIPT

Sophie Lou Jacobsen: I do try to make my work feel like it doesn’t exist within a certain time or moment in time. I was noticing decorations or motifs or shapes hundreds of years ago that you still find today and seeing them repeat, make it able to live in a space today, because it’s much more focused on the emotional reaction, rather than what’s happening outside in our aesthetic world today. 

Dan Rubinstein: Hi, I’m Dan Rubinstein and this is The Grand Tourist. I’ve been a design journalist for more than 20 years, and this is my personalized guided tour to the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food, and travel, all the elements of a well-lived life. Welcome to a new episode of our special series, The Grand Tourist Introduces, sponsored by Lumens. Today, we’ll meet three different emerging design practices that are making waves in the industry. You’ll hear from a French-American talent that finds inspiration from history to create something completely new with her inventive works in classic materials from tabletop to lighting, and you’ll hear from a pair of former journalists that are just as ease creating a fashion flagship as they are a really great summer home. 

But first, we meet one of the most exciting architecture and interior design firms today, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, the bi-coastal firm, founded in 2014 by LA-based architect, Andre Herrero, and New York-based interior designer, Adam Charlap Hyman, create a wide variety of projects with an utterly unique point of view that’s fueled by a host of curated references. In their work, you might find a booth for a blue-chip gallery at an art fair with a bright green rug one moment or a conversation pit in a SoHo loft the next, or a Los Angeles pied-à-terre with a vertical stainless steel fireplace. 

I caught up with the pair from their respective studios in New York and LA to chat about how the pair first began collaborating, how the word soulful comes into play to describe their sometimes hard to categorize portfolio, and what creative process it produces such unconventional, curated work. 

Adam, you worked in furniture design at RISD, or you studied it at RISD. Andre, you are an architect and you’re working for places like Chipperfield and SANAA and stuff like that, but I read that you guys started working together when someone photographed another’s apartment. Who can tell me that story? 

Adam Charlap Hyman: So yeah, we were friendly and I think admired each other’s work from afar. Andre is a good photographer and was doing a lot of photography for mostly, I guess, fashion students for their portfolios. I thought that it could be very cool if he would agree to photograph my apartment for my portfolio because I had made my senior year apartment a project and I made a lot of the furniture for it. It was an homage to this fashion editor in the ’50s. I was imagining his apartment and the way it might’ve looked, anyways. So, I asked Andre to photograph it and he said yes, which was so great. 

He had this fantastic idea to use different cameras and photograph it at all different times of day, some real film, some digital, to create a body of documentation that would suggest the passage of a long period of time in the apartment when in reality, I had only been there for maybe seven or eight months. It worked really well and we had so much fun doing it together and I think got to know each other in this funny and very particular way. 

That experience definitely shaped a lot of our initial friendship and conversations around design and architecture, the way that it connects to the passage of time to storytelling, to biography, to people in history. I think that the documentation of our work has been very important to us. So, when we actually did decide to start a firm together several years later, this was a big part of what we were doing was making sure that we would be able to capture these ephemeral spaces that we were making in just the way we wanted. So, Andre has taken most of our portfolio images.

Andre, what was your story before you studied design? How did you find yourself getting into the design world? 

Andre Herrero: I mean, ever since I was a child, ever since, I was always drawing, I was always an artsy kid, I guess. I think Adam has a similar story in that where renovating our own bedrooms at age 11, 12. Yeah. So, I think it was my path from day one. 

Andre, if you meet someone at a party and someone just is like, “Oh, my God. You’re a designer and you guys create homes and all these amazing spaces. What is your work like?”, how do you reply? 

AH: Oh, gosh. Well, if I’m at a party, I usually just whip out the website because a photo speaks a thousand words, but I understand we’re on a podcast here. Words are not my strong suit, but the line that I typically use is that… What did we say earlier, Adam? 

ACH: Artistic, soulful, specific to the context. That’s the most non-answer answer. I don’t know what to say. 

I don’t know. I would say if you guys said soulful, I would say that that is somehow a word that I don’t hear a lot. I mean, I hear a lot of people like context and there’s always the story of the designer who meets the client and asks to see their wardrobe, and then it’s like it’s all bespoken tailored to you. But there is something to what you guys do that has a soul that feels that nothing that is just an extension of an owner’s personality, that there is something quite special about what you guys are doing that comes across as unique. 

AH: I think a word that we use a lot in the office is it just organically comes up as collage because we are thinking very intentionally about the past and the way things are put together to make something new. We’re definitely not historicists, but we are very sensitive to history. Yeah, I think that if you zoom out where we’ve been looking at all of our work as we put together a bunch of projects to look at in a big portfolio that we’re making, and I do think that there is a quality of line that we’ve been working on and a certain color sensibility and a formal quality that relates to the density of the rooms that we make to the line of the architecture that we’re working with. 

So, I think in that sense, we do have really an aesthetical project that we’ve been refining over the years that has to do with line and form and space and color. So, there’s that. But yeah, I think in a more deeper way, this idea that we make very soulful, very artistic interiors and buildings or very, very soulful, very artistic spaces is the ticket. 

Adam, tell me about perhaps a world that you think you guys have built that was not to type, that maybe was different from what you normally do or something that a project of yours that maybe speaks to what Andre was saying. 

ACH: To the evolution of this? 

Yeah, the fact that you don’t have a specific look that you can do different projects that maybe each one is different from another that to someone who didn’t know your work that could just look at and be like, “Oh, these two things don’t look necessarily like a firm that pumps out the same thing every time.” Is there a project that you think embodies that idea? 

ACH: Yeah, well, I think that obviously, we do our own architecture, but something that maybe a niche that we have found is interpreting for a new generation of owners historically significant architecture. So, we’ve wound up working on an IM Pei house simultaneous to a Stanford White house. Obviously, these require very different everything, but I think that we’ve approached them both with the same artfulness and sensitivity to the context and very bespoke process to the client. 

In some ways with those projects where we’re working on an existing house, especially one that has an interesting history, we do become in part archaeologists but also documentarians in that we have to create a new product, like a new story out of what we find. I think that if you look closely, I’m sure that somebody can see that they’re done by the same person, that we do have a voice that has been woven into both projects, but yeah, superficially, they look really different obviously. One is an octagonal house in Long Island by Stanford White from the turn of the century, and one is a townhouse that I. M. Pei called home on Sutton Place. So, yeah, it couldn’t be more different. 

AH: There was one month where there was an article that our firm was mentioned, one article was about maximalism, and in the same month, there was another article about minimalism.

You got press in both. 

AH: Correct. 

Awesome. It seems like that also because you guys are partners that the architecture and the interiors element of the work is like 50/50. It’s not an architecture firm that does interiors or an interiors firm that also decided it can also do architecture. Is that fair to say? That is part-

AH: I would say so. 

… from the beginning that seems to be unique, the fact that also it happened that way, but it also happened with a little bit of you guys are young. How many years has it been now with the firm? 

ACH: Ten. Oh gosh, 10 years. Oh, my God. 

AH: Yeah. 

How are you guys set up today? Who’s based where and how are you guys making it? Where’s your teams and all sorts of things like that? 

AH: So we have two teams. We’re based on the West Coast and East Coast, Los Angeles and New York. We have interior designers and architects in both studios and Adam’s based in the New York Office. I’m based in the LA one. 

Do you feel like you pull different inspirations from West Coast and East Coast? Do you think that’s an element of it that you guys aren’t so wedded to one scene or another? Adam, I think I’m speaking to you right now from Aspen. Andre, you’re somewhere else. 

AH: Yeah, I would say we’re also from the West Coast and East Coast respectively as well. So, there’s definitely some of that. I think our clients are also from West Coast and East Coast. 

ACH: And everywhere. We’ve been working everywhere. I think we’ve been very comfortable figuring out how to make it possible to work in Europe, in Latin America, in the Middle East. Since the beginning, we were getting fun, exciting projects in places that were not where we were based and we had to figure it out because we wanted to do them so badly. So, at this point, we’ve done projects in Venice, Italy multiple times, in Vienna, in Dubai, all the time working all over the US, Miami, Aspen, Maine, whatever. 

So, I think that while we are, of course, very informed by where the two offices are based and where Andre and I come from, we’re also quite fluid and don’t feel hyper-connected to one of those two places necessarily. Even though maybe we do have a romantic attachment to those places, I think the rest of the world stimulates us very much and we’re happy to work on things all over the place and it brings us so much joy to be able to work on things in other places. In fact, I think those have been some of the most rewarding experiences in terms of design being able to go somewhere exciting and work in a typology of project that’s different than the one we would find around the corner, let’s say. 

Adam, you and I did a panel where you described, speaking of collage that you brought up earlier. We talked a little bit about how you work with a new client, let’s say, a residential one, and about that creative process that you follow as somebody to arrive at these designs that you guys create. Maybe the two of you can walk me through someone like myself, if I was like, “Okay, guys. I’m creating a cabin in the woods and I would love to hire you guys,” what is that onboarding process like with a client that comes to you with a request like that? 

ACH: So we would make a proposal that would get a bunch of questions answered about budget and timeline. So, that would be done. Then we would start our reference image process, which is a time when we come together with several hundred images that have been organized into a variety of categories specific to the project, to the client. Those categories could be very concrete, like the color of the rooms in these images. It could be a little bit very specific like big objects in small rooms, and it could be more conceptual like the feeling, the density of furniture in a film still of a movie. 

AH: I would say in tandem with the reference images, we would also start to work on just 3D spatial explorations in the computer. We start at the computer very early on and that just starts to give very quickly a sketch of scale and placing cabin in context. I think there’s a very intuitive through this iterative process of both finding your attachments and the reference images, but also starting to develop spatial forms and spatial ideas. It’s at some point those two worlds start to converge. I think that we are studying the problem that we need to solve in a lot of different contexts and scales and themes that then get resolved further down the line. 

ACH: Yeah, we put a lot out there right at the beginning. We come at the projects with full force. So, if we were working with you, you’d have a lot to respond to very quickly because we see a lot of the challenge of getting something done with a client to be actually just getting to know the client. We sometimes don’t have the language to really exchange ideas in a productive way. So, the imagery, initial studies, all of this gives some vocabulary really to be able to work with so that we can get to know each other and develop trust in each other’s vision and confidence in each other’s ability to articulate what we want and how we see it. We start like this, and by the end of that first phase, we have some floor plans. 

We have maybe 50 images that speak to all these different aspects of the project in a free associative way. It’s really like a therapy exercise. Then once we have that, we take a really big dive or what we see as a really big dive into creating two options is generally how we start. We create two options for every step of the way. So, we would present you with two versions of each room, two versions of the building, two schemes. It’s not a choice per se. People tend to favor one over the other. 

What I usually see is that they take 70% of one, 20% of the other, and there’s a balance of 10% to work out. It’s good for us because we’ve only put four things that we really believe in. So, people are choosing between only things that we really are excited about and that’s how we would get started. So, it’s a pretty thorough and very collaborative process where we’re taking in a lot of information from the person. Once we’ve got a direction, we start making it real. So, that’s when all the construction drawings and schedules and budgets come out, but yeah, that’s the beginning of the creative part. 

Your firm has been around for 10 years. Half of that time I’m sure was pandemic-ish era of all of that and a very changing time for everybody in so many different ways. Even though you’re doing this collage experience with clients and you’re trying to find the beauty first before you put pen to paper and before you start measuring anything, but I’m wondering where do you guys find your inspiration? There must be sparks coming from somewhere. Maybe even you just tell me your own personally, where somewhere you guys are pulling your eye. Where is this taste level coming from? 

AH: I think we both love traveling and I think traveling is the best for inspiration. It also relaxes you, gets you out of the studio. 

It’s not just like travel-y, but it’s in this new context of you’re working probably when you’re also traveling, I’m sure.

AH: Yeah, I mean always working. It’s the nature of being the principal, but also trying to detach and trying to find space for those new ideas. I think that if you’re grinding and grinding and grinding, you’re only seeing what’s in front of you and it’s important to step back, detach, and create the space for the new ideas to flow in. 

Adam? 

ACH: Well, I really love images and cataloging images and I take a lot of photos on foot. I try to see as much as I possibly can. Always wherever I am, I always am trying to see houses. I got advice when I was pretty young from a really amazing interior designer named Howard Slatkin. I was in high school, I think, and he said that the way that you will get better is by going to see the houses that you admire and not just going and looking at photos of them, but really going to them and looking at everything. So, I think that Andre and I both are just always, always going to see stuff. We always are looking. 

What’s the last amazing thing you saw in terms of a house or a project like that?

AH: Well, just yesterday, I was on a boat in Long Beach and there’s this amazing Frank Gehry. I don’t know what it is. I haven’t looked it up yet, but just this amazing Frank Gehry sculptural piece out in the middle of the water. I think it’s hiding an oil rig or something. I have no idea, but I took a ton of photos, a ton of videos. I’m going to dissect that later. Very cool. 

Adam, what about you? 

ACH: I had the opportunity to go visit James Ivory at his house in Claverack, and I’ve been on a journey researching octagonal houses because we’re working on this octagonal house in Long Island. I’m very curious about how people resolve the interior spaces of the octagon. James’s house is an octagon. It’s a Greek revival octagon. I went up there.

It’s a Merchant Ivory fame if I’m correct. 

ACH: Yeah. So, I was able to organize to go and visit him and see this amazing house, which is full of furniture that was used as props in the movies. It’s a very, very personal expression of his and Ismail Merchant’s vision and careers and whole lives. It was really exciting. Architecturally and from a programmatic place, I actually learned a lot. I mean the image thing is so important that we have actually this software that we use to organize all of our references. 

I’ve been scanning things since college and we have thousands and thousands and thousands of reference images that are organized in a software that is shared between everyone in the studio and we are constantly using it as a resource to understand how to approach any variety of problems that we’re faced with and as a well for all kinds of ideas, but it’s a really fun tool. Yeah. 

Andre, do you ever dip into these photos? 

AH: I love the reference bank that we have. It’s amazing. It’s so fun. I don’t know half of what’s in there. Adam’s the historian of the two of us, but I am like Yves Saint Laurent. He said, “How would you catch a trend? I just open the window and catch a trend like a cold.” That’s like me diving into Adam’s reference image library. So, I’ll go in there. I don’t know what I’m looking at, but then I’ll start building architecture based off of it and then it turns into something interesting. So, it’s really fun to play off of Adam’s reference images like that.

Well, let me ask you this. What’s next for you? What is your next big project on the horizon? 

ACH: Well, we have lots of projects on the horizon. 

Well, anything aside from just client work? 

ACH: Well, I mean, one thing is that we designed a restaurant in Hudson, New York that’s opening at the end of the summer and we’re really excited about that. 

Is it your first restaurant? 

ACH: Mm-hmm.

Okay. 

ACH: Well, it’s our first restaurant from scratch. It’s our first restaurant where we invented the whole world of it. We did update EAT, the original EAT on Madison Avenue a few months ago. We are participating in a show in LA at Marta Gallery with the lights that I described. So, that is happening in September. 

AH: And then on the architecture with a capital A side, which is pretty exciting, we’re working on 160,000 square foot bio lab space in Missoula, Montana that is all out of mass timber, which is really exciting. 

If you had to describe your practice in three words, what would you say? I’ll let both of you pick three. 

AH: Soulful.

ACH: Artistic.

AH: Rigorous. 

ACH: I’m down for that.

AH: Sounds good. 

(SPONSOR BREAK)

The work of my next guest can best be described simply as poetic. Sophie Lou Jacobsen is a French-American designer who built her own brand from higher-priced collectible works to lighting collaborations and everyday wares that are truly inspiring a new generation of estates. Through her works in glass and metal from tabletop to lighting, her pieces are always a little bit quirky with a gentle feminine appeal, and they strike a certain nostalgic tone that’s hard to place. I caught up with Sophie from her home in New York. 

I read that you were born in Seattle to French parents, and you grew up both here and in France. Now that you’ve been in New York for a while, how do you describe looking back that upbringing as fellow Americans that’s unique? 

Sophie Lou Jacobsen: Yeah, I think that I was very fortunate to have the upbringing that I had. So, both my parents are French, as you mentioned, and they moved to Seattle pretty much right before I was born for my dad’s job. So, I grew up in Seattle, but two French parents, we spoke French at home. We spent summers in France. We would do French school outside of normal public school hours. They really made sure to give us the French culture knowing that we weren’t able to get it from where we were living. But at the same time, when I think about my childhood and my upbringing, Seattle was a major part of that. I didn’t go to a French [inaudible 00:31:02] or anything like that. 

So, I really got to understand both cultures very well and very deeply. Seattle is an absolutely beautiful place to grow up. It’s so calm and peaceful and beautiful and so much nature. It’s not a big city, but it’s not a small city. So, it’s a very comfortable place for kids. I think having that access to nature at all times is something that I absolutely took for granted back then and realize now that it had a lasting impact on me and my sensibilities towards the world. But then we ended up moving back to France when I was 16. So, I finished high school in Paris, which at the time I wasn’t happy about, which is funny to say in hindsight, but it was a difficult cultural shock move at a time that’s hard for teenagers. 

But I think that actually making that move and learning how to really adapt to a new culture at that age also gave me a flexibility in terms of understanding people and knowing how to navigate within different cultures and different societies and different cities. That’s something that I think I try to integrate in my work today. I really want to look at a lot of different types of people and make work that will respond to a lot of different types of people and a lot of different types of people will understand and feel connected to. So, I think that the movement between the two countries at the end of the day really just gave me a deeper appreciation and understanding of humans in a sense and understanding their differences and sensibilities. 

Then aside from that, I definitely think that I’m very drawn to a lot of aspects of French culture when it comes to living, the food, the rituals, the quality of life, the pace of life. That is certainly something that I want to add into all of the work that I do. I think that living in the States gave me a really nice opportunity to highlight some of these rituals that maybe are missing from day-to-day life for a lot of people. That’s I think where I’ve found my niche at the moment. 

How did you get into design? 

SLJ: So I got into design actually because growing up, I think I was more drawn to architecture. I didn’t really understand design as a field or know that it was a field, and I knew that I loved homes and spaces and interiors and objects. So, architecture made sense. When I moved to France, to be perfectly honest, the academic rigor of French school and university was very hard for me coming from an American school. After I graduated high school, I wanted to take a break before jumping into university right away. So, I decided to go to art school instead and the way that it operates- 

Where was the art school? 

SLJ: It was in Paris. Often in France and I think in most of Europe, when you go to art school, you have one year of a prep school where you’re getting your portfolio ready. That’s what I did for that year. At that school, which is called Atelier de Sèvres, I met a teacher who was an industrial designer, and she took me under her wing and guided me towards that field. I discovered that that was a field that could be a career, and I realized that that was what I wanted to do. 

At some point, you lived in London for a while and then to New York. Tell me about that early part of your post-college life. 

SLJ: The first pieces that I created under my studio just under my name, which eventually became my studio, was a collection of glassware, which it was in response to a brief for a group show during New York Design Week in 2018 called Furnishing Utopia. It was a recurring group show that happened, I think, three or four years in a row with a focus on the American Shaker movement and asking designers to reinterpret some of the Shaker philosophy into contemporary design. At that year that I participated, the focus was specifically on chores. 

So, I created a collection of glass objects that were designed to be able to easily make your own cleaning products at home using just vinegar and water and baking soda essentially, but the objects themselves were very expressive and decorative and beautiful. The idea being that if you create objects that are attractive and that people feel emotionally connected with, then they’ll be more likely to use them and that’ll encourage certain patterns of behavior. 

That was the first time I worked in glass, and I immediately fell in love with the material and the way that I could respond to the designs that I had and see the way that I was designing leap off of the page in this really almost immediate way through glass. Those pieces ended up being the core of the first collection that I launched a year later, which is what really set off the studio. 

How do you describe a collection that really set things off? If you had to just describe the aesthetic that you’re creating that now you’ve become known for, what does that look like? 

SLJ: So, the first collection was very graphic. It was very colorful, quite playful. I think at the time and still today, I was very interested in bringing joy into people’s lives through both the aesthetic of the object and the interaction with the object. I think that over time, that expression of joy has transformed and it’s not always based on so much color and so much obvious playfulness. So, the collection has moved and evolved a lot since I started with that original line. But I think that it’s still very relevant because of the emotional aspect of it and what I was trying to get the people who are using the objects to feel when engaging with them. 

What’s your most popular design at the moment? 

SLJ: I think there’s different answers to that in the different areas of my work. So, I launched the Bouquet Collection, which is the clear stemware with the ridged edges and little dew balls on the stem. I launched that a year ago, and that’s been extremely popular since I launched it. So, I would say that at the moment, that’s the most popular houseware, but the Flora Collection of lighting that I did in collaboration with In Common With is still just an absolute fan favorite. It’s the gift that keeps giving, which is really wonderful. It seems like people are still really very excited by it, which is so great to see. Strangely enough, the product that I launched the studio with in 2019, which is called the Ripple Cup. It’s a small, little colorful glass with wavy edges. It’s still the bread and butter and yeah. 

Is it? Okay, they’re like tumblers. They’re traditional, but you could also think of them as almost like groovy ’60s, ’70s, something, right? 

SLJ: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. 

They come in different colors, I’m assuming, because I’m looking at it on your site as we speak. 

SLJ: Yes. 

So I guess that’s the bread and butter. 

SLJ: I mean, in a way it still is.

Or evergreen, I guess. 

SLJ: I think that cup, for lack of a better word, went viral and it just was so popular for a few years. It is still just reeling off of that, but it’s also taken an absolute life of its own. So, in a lot of ways, I don’t own that design anymore. I never did any copyright on it or anything like that. Now, I went to a manufacturing trade show earlier in the year, and the Ripple Cup was on every manufacturer’s shelf. I spoke with my factory and they were like, “Where did this design even come from?” They didn’t know that they were the first people to make it, but I think that that’s funny and I really don’t mind it. It’s become ubiquitous, which is as an industrial designer a huge success and goal. I would really just like to one day be able to produce it on a scale where it can be actually really, really affordable and see it in even more places. 

Yeah, it’s pretty affordable now. I mean it’s about $35 per cup or something like that? 

SLJ: Yeah.

So that’s pretty good. 

SLJ: It’s pretty good. 

In the world of Grand Tourist, that’s pretty good. 

SLJ: It could be the Duralex glass, which is $5, something like that. 

Tell me about this new adventure in lighting. 

SLJ: Yes. So, In Common With is a lighting design studio that are also based in New York. They started off as being really just lighting, but they have recently opened a showroom in Tribeca called Quarters, where they’re expanding into furniture and tabletop. It’s this really big, beautiful project. There’s going to be a bar. There’s a pantry. So, we started our studios at a similar time and met right before the pandemic. Their name is In Common With. The collaboration was always part of their business model. They appreciated the exploration that I was having with glass and sensitivity to the materiality of working with glass. So, suggested that we do a collaboration together. Then the pandemic happened and things moved very slowly. 

So, for a couple of years, we were sending each other sketches every few months and nothing really happened until there was an aha moment with a vase that I had designed for a French company called La Romaine Editions. It was the poppy vase. It’s like a red vase with black balls around it and a wavy top. I was staring at the vase and I was like, “Oh, if we turn this upside down, it would be a beautiful pendant.” I sent that to Nick and Felicia. They got really excited, and immediately, we started fleshing this out into a much larger collection, which I never imagined that it would end up being a 22-piece collection. I think that was really Nick and Felicia driving that ambition, which was so incredible for me to have them as partners for that reason. 

More than just manufacturing partners, we were absolute design partners and that vase was the beginning of it, but it turned into something much bigger that we all worked on collaboratively. I think that what is really successful about that collection, again, we were looking at a lot of Venetian glass craft and history. We both work with the same glassblower, and he’s very well-trained in a lot of those techniques. So, that was something that we wanted to incorporate and create a collection of lighting that’s in production, but that still has that dedication to craft, which is something that we used to see a lot, but isn’t always as prevalent anymore in the way that things are made today. 

Our relationship with the glassblower allowed for that to happen. I think because of all of that, we were really successful in creating something that has those old world sensibilities, but also is very contemporary because it’s the balance between the craft and the production aspects. We shot the collection at a castle in Austria, very, very-

Very warm. I’m actually looking at it now, very super warm and traditional with a lot of paper-

SLJ: Exactly.

… and wood and art.

SLJ: But very historical. But then we’re seeing these lights in very modern, very contemporary projects, and they look just as good in one or the other. I think that that is really where the success of the collection is that it’s something a little bit surprising and different, but also that easily fits in different environment. 

You mentioned the word decorative arts or the term decorative arts a lot when there are a lot of young designers that don’t like that term and always have shied away from it. It’s almost like a dirty word in a sense. They’d be insulted if you called what they do decorative arts. Are you someone who likes to use the term rather than design, or are we over design? Sometimes I do. I feel like that word has become so overused that now it doesn’t mean anything anymore. 

SLJ: Yeah, I haven’t even really thought about that. It didn’t occur to me that people didn’t necessarily like that word. I think for me, it just describes what I do the most because it’s not just design, it’s not just industrial design. Like you said, design is such a wide scope of things. I wouldn’t call myself an artist either because art is a completely different field and set of considerations, and my work is still very human focused and functional. Not that art isn’t human focused, but it’s functional. Yeah, perhaps decoration has taken over the years, it got a bad reputation. 

But for me, decoration is what gives soul and life to the objects we surround ourselves with and the spaces that we live in. Even when there’s no decoration or an object has been completely stripped of decoration, that’s a decorative choice to do that. So, I think it’s just a term that I respond to. My favorite museum is the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. It’s the Museum of Decorative Arts. When I’m looking at my favorite designers through history, they’re referred to as in the world of decorative arts. So, yeah, maybe it’s time for that word to make a comeback. 

What’s next for you? 

SLJ: So I am currently working on a show that will be launching in London in September during London Design Festival, which is a showroom installation at De Gournay, which is a wallpaper company based in London, but they have showrooms in London and Paris and New York and Los Angeles now. 

Very famous for their hand-painted wallpaper. 

SLJ: Exactly. They make these beautiful hand-painted wallpapers and embroidered wallpapers. The aesthetic is also very old world traditional and reinventing and reinterpreting those techniques and those aesthetics for today’s world. So, there is a really, I think, beautiful relationship between what they do and what I do. They often will have designers take over their showrooms for different activations, either design weeks or trade shows, things like this. They reached out at a certain point, not quite a year ago, to work with them. So, I have been designing a new collection to show in that space, responding to the wallpapers that are going to be on display at that time. 

It’s really exciting because there will be, of course, a lot of faces, which is what people are used to seeing from me. But I’m also going to be showing some lighting, which of course, I’ve done the floor collection, but this will be the first lights that I’m producing on my own, under my own name, not a collaborative project, and a mirror, which I’m also very excited about, and some sconces. So, it was a really beautiful opportunity to explore and expand in some of the ways that I’ve been thinking about over the past year. 

It’s going to be colorful and I hope really beautiful. I also am working with a good friend of mine, Christopher Colley, on the project who is an antique dealer here in New York. He’s going to be helping me with the sonography of the space and the furniture selection and set dressing. So, I love to work with people and friends. So, yeah, it’s going to be a good project. 

If you had to describe who Sophie Lou Jacobsen is in three words, what would those be? 

SLJ: So I think I would say curious, optimistic, and evolving. 

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Not everyone in the world of architecture and design follows a traditional path. My last two guests today prove that sometimes an outsider’s point of view is just what’s needed in order to shake things up. Partners in life and work, Noam Dvir and Daniel Rauchwerger of the firm BoND, Bond stands for Bureau of Noam and Daniel, met in Tel Aviv where the two were working in the world of journalism before the two decided to study at Harvard together, followed by a stint at the famed architecture firm, OMA and others before setting out on their own. 

Since then, they have created transgressive art gallery spaces, inventive apartments and fashion boutiques, and a revitalized architectural language of desire for the much talked about coastal gay community of the Fire Island Pines. I caught up with Noam and Daniel from their home in New York. 

I read that the two of you met working on a newspaper in Tel Aviv, which of course I think I had known, but I keep forgetting it because you guys have become so successful as designers. So, tell me a little bit about your lives before starting in a newspaper. Noam, let’s start with you. 

Noam Dvir: Yeah, so architecture is actually new for the both of us. I was a journalist for 12 years and I’ve been practicing for only nine. So, actually, I had a full life before this. We both grew up in Israel. As you know, in Israel, the military service is mandatory. I was lucky enough to get into the IDF Radio, which in Israel is a little bit like NPR. So, it’s quite liberal. It’s very, very popular. So, I started in radio, then moved to television, did a bunch of things in television, both on the hard news angle and more design and fun stuff, more entertainment. Then in my last position in press, I was the architecture writer for Haaretz newspaper, which is similar to the New York Times or The Guardian, so the liberal left-leaning newspaper in Israel. 

By that time, I already studied architecture, although I didn’t really practice. I was this big shot in a tight pond. It’s not hard to be a big shot. Then I was lucky enough to be invited by Daniel’s professor. He went to Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem for architecture, and I would get his invite to be a jury on final reviews. I already knew Daniel wrote for the newspaper. I had a crush on him, I guess, but then really didn’t manifest until he stepped into the room and I realized this is going to be the rest of my life. Then of course, the connection with the newspaper was really nice because we started spending so much time together and we would spend the morning writing and going to the beach and have this really beautiful period of falling in love and thinking how this is forever. 

Daniel, what about you? What is your leading up to writing? You studied design or tell me about that life before you met Noam. 

Daniel Rauchwerger: Yeah. So, actually, I grew up practicing classical piano and I was pretty serious about it. Probably until the age of 19 or 20, I started going to the Music Academy in Tel Aviv University. Actually, Noam spoke about the military. I didn’t go to the military because of heart surgery. So, I found myself basically at around 19 or 20-year-old in the Music Academy and thinking, “Is this actually what I want to do for the rest of my life or do I want to do something else?” 

I somehow decided that architecture is a direction that I’ve always been interested in, and started studying it around the age of 20 at Bezalel Academy. So, that started bubbling up. Then journalism almost came into that from a very different angle. I grew up in Jaffa, which is just south of Tel Aviv, and both of my parents are very serious artists. So, I really grew up immersed in the Tel Aviv art scene, which it’s similar to the small pond of journalism. Everything is small in Israel. It’s a very small scene of art as well. 

What kind of artists were they? 

DR: My dad is a painter. His name is Jan Rauchwerger. My mom, Galit, is a photographer and etching artist. I think that there was always maybe a spirit of also just hosting a lot of their friends at home and hosting concerts at home for classical music. Lots of people from poets to musicians and other visual artists that were really frequent visitors at home. So, I think that the connection to the art scene there and then writing about it was really natural. That really started where journalism basically began. So, I started writing about art really from very familiar knowledge. 

I think that there is something about growing up with it, even though at times it’s very challenging, especially on the financial front, but culturally, you have such a rich childhood. I think that you also are able to talk about things like arts that for a lot of people are very high as something that’s just a matter of fact or part of life. I think without knowing where we would be today, it’s actually brought so much of the background and the confidence to do what we do today. So, it’s really related to those years. 

You guys are writing and in this world, and then at some point, you guys decided to jump ship as it were and go to Harvard and study graduate level design. I believe you worked in different degrees. So, tell me about that decision to say… I was going to say adios, but whatever, say adios to a life in Tel Aviv and to go all the way to Harvard and to go on this adventure together. Noam, tell me about that decision. 

ND: Sometimes you say it’s gradually, then suddenly. So, I loved writing and I loved the media world and I was really quite veteran at what I did. In 2010, I went to cover the Venice Biennale for Haaretz, and I met all of these incredible people there, like Michael Bullock, who’s the editor of PIN-UP, and Philip Worcester, who is partner in business, and Jürgen Mayer and a bunch of these group of, I would say, A-list design homosexuals. Can I say homosexuals or should I say A-list design gays? 

A gays or A design Gays. 

ND: I don’t know what can go on record, but who were fabulous and did all of these really exciting things. There were my age or my age, and I thought, “Wow, this is really something I want to do.” I started looking at graduate degrees first in Europe. Then through a friend’s recommendation, started looking at the opportunities in the US. I first got into the enrollment process through the Fulbright. I actually got the Fulbright and then decided to forego it to go to Harvard because the Fulbright, the way it works, they usually pick the school for you. 

They didn’t want me to go to Harvard. So, I threw the Fulbright. I was enrolled into Harvard. I found somebody to pay for it, and Daniel said, “I’m coming. I’ll come for the ride and I’m going to get into Harvard as well.” So we moved together and that’s exactly what happened. 

Was there a culture shock coming into… Because after that, you guys went to OMA, I believe, and you sold yourself as a package deal, which I think is so rare. As you said in other interviews, that’s obviously a funny thing to tell an employer, you need us as a couple or that’s it. What was that like coming into the working world of design at a place like OMA, which was here in New York, correct? 

ND: Yeah. Well, Shohei Shigematsu was my professor, who was one of the partners. [inaudible 01:02:31] was my professor. I mean, just incredible and always told me, “Whenever you are ready, you and Daniel come for an interview.” Being really the incredible person, mentor, architect that he is, he saw something in us and wanted to accommodate it. Even when we got into OMA and started working, it was like, “Well, one day when you’ll do your own thing…” He had this extreme clarity about where we’re going much more than us. OMA was this incredible home, school, tormented environment at times, but overall, an incredible experience of creativity and design. 

When you guys set out on your own, what was you in your head? What was your BOND architecture’s going to be this? What did you want to do? What was in your head? 

DR: We’re probably going to have pretty different replies to this.

Noam, tell me a little about what was in your head. 

ND: So we started BOND. We looked for a name. I think there was, at the time I watched it, McDonald’s movie. There was a line there about how the founder had a Polish last name and somebody told him, “Just call it McDonald’s. Nobody would ever know how to say your name.” So that’s exactly our case. Dvir-Rauchwerger would be so complicated. So, we went with BOND, which spells the Bureau of Noam and Daniel. So, it started about us, about our interests and whatever we can get. The mission statement was to take on one hand our editing and communication skills there as journalists and really as an architect, this is 75% of what you do. You develop design, you edit, you communicate it if you do it well. 

Hopefully, you are a little talented. You can get somewhere. The other part was to take what we learned at OMA, this edginess and rush for creativity and something new and put them together and do something very different. I would add to that that although today obviously, it’s much more pronounced and articulated in our work, but obviously, the queer angle was super important from day one. I don’t think that there’s necessarily queer design, but there is design for queer people or for lifestyle. I think that’s something that was at the backstage as we started, but we immediately realized it’s going to be the spine of our work in the office. 

Daniel, are you going to disagree and say you dreamed about producing post offices and libraries and universities, or tell me about what was in your head?

DR: So I mean, we said before gradually and then suddenly. I think that was also the case with the office. There were a few projects that maybe started going, but then there was one project that really tipped the scale, which was Company Gallery. I was still working a full-time job and that was a project that was too big to just moonlight. So, I think at that point, both of us needed to be involved and just trust the process. This is going to become something. I think that there’s the social agenda of being a queer office was really always very important and we didn’t want it to slip away. 

Luckily, I think there has been a bit of a queer Renaissance in New York in the past few years and a lot of new culture that really came out of COVID. It has to do with nightlife and it has to do with specific artists that really surfaced after or during this time. I think for us, there was all of this coincidence of culture and art that we felt that we are a part of. In a way, Company Gallery was really at their intersection of those things. 

Tell people a little bit about Company Gallery and what it is and what you guys did there.

DR: So Company Gallery is owned by Sophie Mörner and is a gallery that is in the Bowery area, Lower SoHo on Broome Street in the corner of Elizabeth. It used to be in a different location. They found this building that was a cold storage warehouse and in a pretty bad condition when we started working on it, both technically leaking, no mechanical systems. Everything was really needed to be touched in order to make it into an art space. It was a very big project for us who really just started the office the same year. So, there was huge challenge, but it was like if there was a challenge that we were going to step up to, this is it. This is your chance. I think we really took it with really all of that responsibility. We tried to do that with every project. 

I think in the case of this one, it was somehow trying to preserve this very New York envelope of a building, not touching it too much, and still keeping some of the grits that the building has. Whatever becomes the art gallery space, still exposing it as a bit of an insert within warehouse. So, something that doesn’t completely erase the history. I think that if we talk a little bit about what is our mission statement or where do we lie in terms of our design direction, I think that we grew up in the context of really Tel Aviv, which is very truly recognized for its connection to Bauhaus, an enormous collection of buildings that are international style. But then when you work in New York, it’s really a very different context. 

It’s very mixed and diverse. There’s a lot more older buildings, newer buildings, and you have to be open to working with so many different styles. There isn’t this one direction of modernism. So, I think there’s always maybe a gradient between the modernist, cleanliness, and minimal side that you strive for. But at the other end, something that’s also young and queer and is like, “Fuck the Bauhaus,” and more about celebrating also trash culture and nightlife. I think we play that ping pong many times in our work and we like to have things that are off the moment and color and playfulness in the projects, sense of humor. In many ways, you can really see it very clearly at Company. 

So, it was having this lesbian bar downstairs with pink neon lights and a gallery that could also maybe in a different setting look like a dark room in a club. So, there’s a lot of these references that I think if you are from our world, you might see them. If you are not, maybe it will just look like a clean gallery to you, but they’re there. 

ND: I think it’s often that people or architecture designer would say, “Oh, what would the client think about this?” For me, it’s like, “Oh, what would the client think about this?” Meaning let’s go for it, right? It’s a part of your visual world and I think that the architecture sometimes is seen by its creators as something so complicated and so serious, but at the end of the day, it’s something so tactile. That’s the spaces we live in. So, Andy Warhol said it’s always a mix of high and low. So, I think that’s a key driver in our work. 

Lately, you’ve worked on, you are working on at least I think half a dozen projects on the beloved Fire Island, which is near New York for those who don’t know. It’s like a gay resort community. I don’t know. It’s like a hundred miles from the city. You guys have your own house there that you’ve designed, and it’s part of this study that you guys have done about this queer lifestyle and how it relates to design and modernism even. How did that love affair of the island and these homes in particular come about? To explain to me what that might be, listening from Paris, I have no idea. 

ND: As you mentioned, Fire Island Pines is a predominantly queer community located on Fire Island, which is a barrier island south of Long Island. There are 14 communities throughout the island, and there are two that are queer, Cherry Grove and The Pines. The Pines was established in the 1960s, first for straight families, wholesome community, and then late ’60s, early ’70s, mostly homosexual men started buying properties there with queer liberation, human rights flourishing throughout. A lot of very important people, a lot of gay important people started buying there, like Kelvin Klein. Andy Warhol would frequent. 

You’ll have Hockney, the British artist would come and paint there. So, it was this incredible place of culture. It went through a few cycles. First through, of course, AIDS epidemic, then this type of revival. What we’re seeing today in The Pines is a real Renaissance of the community after COVID, where many of the houses, about a third of the houses swapped hands. Many of the new owners are younger owners, which has a lot of new energy. In terms of the architecture, The Pines has really this incredible contextual modernism that was developed for men, essentially for gay men, which means that the houses are sexy. There’s the spaces for gathering that are a lot much larger. There’s a huge emphasis on voyeurism and what you see and where do you see and spaces of desire. 

All of this was encapsulated and was not really highly discussed, I think, until Christopher Rawlins’s book about Horace Gifford, the architect that was really pivotal in making The Pines what it is. So, about a decade ago, everybody started talking about this avant-garde Fire Island modernism, and we came to Fire Island 10 years ago, our first summer in New York. I was interning for Charles Renfro at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Charles had a house there. We came on Fourth of July and our little bird minds just exploded. It was clear to us that this is somewhere that we want to start frequent and we had to share. Then through that experience, we got to know a lot of people and understand more about the architectural history of the island. 

The first client approached us right at the beginning. It was a 1965 kit house, meaning that it brought to the island in bits and pieces and then assembled. It looks like Palm Springs modernist house. It already went through a renovation. We needed a big update, and that was our first project. Then through working on that house, also buying our own house and renovating it, people started approaching us. As you mentioned, we are now in the process of working on our 10th project in The Pines.

Tenth? Oh, my gosh. 

ND: I would say, it’s 600 houses. So, it’s almost 2% of the houses. It’s incredible. We have this gift that we get to work in a special community with incredible context. I would say The Pines is one of these places where culture, gender, history, and design all collide, and we get to work within this context. So, some of the projects are smaller. We also help fellow younger owners with kitchens and bathrooms and simpler stuff. But we are starting construction on our first ground up in the island, which is actually built on the single largest lot in the island. It’s three lots that are joined together and it’s going to be really incredible. It’s a house that thinks about Fire Island in the next 50 years. 

It looks a little bit like Villa Savoye on the beach, meaning that it’s raised above the sea level, about the FEMA level and brings into mind all of the different cognitive experience that we had in The Pines. So, where do you host people? Where do you gossip? How do you see different vantage points from area to area? The house is actually quite small. The footprint is actually quite small, but it has all of these different attitudes towards the landscape, towards the human landscape. We’re really, really excited for it. I think it’s going to be something really special. 

Yeah, mission accomplished. As one of my last questions, if you guys went back to one of the lecture halls at Harvard and you addressed a series, a bunch of students at the graduate level and they introduce you as returning champions, these kids that went out and built a very successful firm that is progressive, that does lots of fun different things and building queer spaces and all of this stuff, what cold water would you throw on the mood there to teach these kids these are going to be your challenges in building a career like that? What would you tell them? 

ND: I always think that there were another 10,000 designers who are stronger maybe than us both at GSD and at OMA. I mean really incredible designers that I looked up to. But I think that there’s a big difference between running an office and selling design, right? Because at the end of the day, what we do, we sell design, we sell ours, we sell ideas. We sell creative thinking and being completely enamored in just in the design. I think that what we strive to do, this is a commercial enterprise. So, I think that our big challenge and also our big success is that we managed to keep the level of design and the level of interest for projects. 

We didn’t go into this super high-endy $20 million apartment. Although if you have one that needs, I’ll do it for you. But we kept it with relatively young clients, fresh ideas and fresh programs and needs. I think that’s our success. Meaning that we can maintain a highly designed forward office in New York with the costs that are associated with that, but still maintain the level of design and level of excitement that we had on day one. 

Daniel, would you agree with that? 

DR: Yeah. I also think that it makes a lot of sense to have a partner, whether it’s your real, in my case, husband or not. But I think that it’s much harder to do it alone, and I’m not a very good manager. I don’t think I would be anywhere if I didn’t have the collaboration with Noam. You have to know your strengths, and you have to really know, “What can you do? What is it that you can do better in the context of a business of design?” I think that sometimes we play on those roles too, and maybe we split the projects, but we’d like to sometimes involve each other and have a second opinion. You’re sitting with, let’s say, a couple to design their house. It’s good to have two voices in the room too. So, I think that there’s something about that. 

Then from the beginning, take yourself very seriously. From the beginning, we immediately knew that we have to work with someone on PR. We have to photograph the projects very seriously and to put time into things that are a little bit more on the marketing side. But when you’re young, how is anybody going to know about your project if it’s not through things that you publish? So I think sometimes people think that we are maybe a bigger team or that we’ve been around for longer, but it is very, very tight. It’s a small studio and we look at everything that comes out.

So, I think for me that there’s something that we also want to keep. We like that smallness, and we like the intimacy of having a little studio that is where we all develop ideas together and is very contextual. I think this office couldn’t be anywhere else. It’s a very New York scene and New York culture and everything is about what is going on here. 

Do you guys think you’re going to stay here in New York until the end of your days? You’re going to be one of the old couples in The Pines? They have these little carts that people drive. 

ND: Yeah. I hope our work takes us different places. Of course, this is our center, but we’re looking at doing a tiny sabbatical in Europe the year after next and teach in a European university. I hope our works takes us to other places and maybe we get to spend more considerable amount of times in places that we had no idea about. While the team here is quite solid and strong, so of course, New York is our center, but I think that we both realize that in order to continue creating and thinking about things differently, we need to continue to travel and meet new people and have different challenges and not do the same thing that we’re doing today in 10 years. 

Thank you to all of my guests, Adam, Andre, Sophie, Noam, and Daniel, as well as to our sponsor, Lumens, 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 at thegrandtourist.net. Follow me on Instagram, @danrubinstein. Don’t forget to follow The Grand Tourist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen and leave as a rating or comment. Every little bit helps. Til next time!

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