AGO Projects: “Urban Safari Meets Preppy Punk”

TRANSCRIPT

Rodman Primack: I’m not attracted to traditional classical forms of symmetry, and I don’t love seeing things that I feel like I’ve seen in other houses. Clients should get something more interesting from us than something that we just know works. I feel like my job is to push beyond that and to try to do something that maybe won’t work, but if it does work, then it’s a lot more interesting than that thing that we know is going to work.

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 through the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food, and travel, all the elements of a well-lived life.

The world of design, collecting, and interiors has felt really stale to me lately. At first, people thought that the age of Instagram and digital culture would usher in a new era of color and creativity. Instead, sometimes it’s turbocharged, a kind of brown-filled landscape of utterly exquisite decor that costs millions per square foot. In some cases, too much good taste can be a bad thing. In others, it goes the opposite direction and it just fills the room with everything unique, and that doesn’t work either. And the attitude that the algorithm generates is the most sickening of them all. But thankfully, there are a few special players in this business that bring oodles of experience, expertise, and the right kind of taste, as well as heaps of good manners and creativity to keep our brains from rotting.

My guests today are those kinds of boys, Rodman Primack and Rudy Weissenberg. A couple in both life and work, the pair run two businesses that intertwine in delightful and thoroughly contemporary ways. First, they have their design gallery called AGO Projects in Mexico City that specializes in colorful, and dare I say it, quirky works of art and design. I visited their space and other installations many times, and I’m always floored by their bold eye for work that includes craft, narrative, color, and amazing people from their own backyard in the areas around Mexico City to people around the world.

Their other part of the business, and more traditionally set up, AGO Interiors is the main subject of the pair’s new book, Love How You Live: Adventures in Interior Design, from Monacelli, that exemplifies their utterly joyful sense of style seen in the portfolio of projects from Kentucky and Hawaii to Manhattan and back again. And the book also includes many of the craftspeople, as well as other creatives they work with, that blend their gallery and interior businesses together.

I’ve known Rodman for ages, first meeting him when he was running the design fair called Design Miami, and as you’ll learn today, he also brings a wealth of experience from places like the Phillips Auction House. Rudy, on the other hand, hails from the world of television from his native Guatemala before he turned to design after getting a degree at Harvard. I caught up with Rodman and Rudy to chat about how the two came together, how the pair approached the world of collecting with their clients, their advice for new designers, the look they crave when it comes to their interiors, and who the gallery would call first in a design emergency.

(MUSICAL BREAK)

Rodman, I knew you first obviously with your firm, RP Miller, and of course I know you from AGO Projects in Mexico City, but I read somewhere that you guys have been together for about 20 years. Do you guys remember how you first met?

Rodman Primack: It’s actually 27 years.

Oh, gosh. Okay. Maybe—

RP: Which maybe I shouldn’t say because it definitely dates us or adds some mileage, but we met in New York City and we’ve been together for 27 years.

Rudy Weissenberg: We met at a very lively Christmas party. I was taken there by friends, and I was traveling, I think, two days after, and I was ready to pack and I was stressed because I’m always stressed and I’m like, “I’m only staying for five minutes.” And then Rodman walked in and I said, “I’ll give it a couple of minutes and see if this starts working. If not, I better go home and pack.” And it kind of did, so.

And it worked for 27 years. Okay.

RW: And so far, so good.

And Rodman, how would you describe Rudy 27 years ago? Who was that man that you met at the Christmas party?

RP: I have to say first I think we were the only two people in the room wearing cotton shirts, which made him stand out because we were the two kind of-

RW: Preppies?

RP: … preps, the two kind of dorks in the room, which immediately made me think I was attracted to that. And he had so much energy and enthusiasm, which he still has today. And the accent, which maybe was a little bit stronger then. I think it’s gotten softer over the years.

RW: It better.

RP: I’ve always had an affinity for Spanish speakers, so I have to say there was a sparkle and a kind of energy from that first moment.

And Rudy, what about Rodman? How would you describe the guy you met at that party?

RW: I think what’s funny is that perhaps we’ve leaned into our interests, but we’ve been these people since we met, if that makes any sense. I mean, two days after we had met, we did our first dinner party together, and then it never stopped. So I think we continue to mine and explore the things we like, but it’s always been there, which is interesting. And I think it’s what’s brought us together and kept us together is all these interests that we share.

And Rodman, you and I first met when you were working at Design Miami as the head of that. And before we get to you, though, I wanted to ask Rudy a little bit. In doing my homework, I read this old piece in the Journal, the Wall Street Journal, that described you in a very Wall Street Journal kind of, very newspaper kind of way, like a former telenovela producer who also worked with Rick Owens on his furniture, had recently received a master’s in design studies from Harvard, which I thought is such an amazing little newspaper bio line. Tell me about your life in television before the world of design, because this is something I had no idea about.

RW: So I always wanted to work in media, and this is something that I really pursued. I come from a country… I come from Guatemala in place where there’s barely any TV production. So I really focused my studies and efforts in getting a job in media. I worked for three of the largest producers of Spanish language content in the world, Univision, Telemundo, and Sony Pictures. And I got hired because I present more like the nerdy finance guy. And then slowly but surely, ended up moving into production, producing thousands of hours of scripted content, which was very much like telenovelas and series, which was a hoot.

I mean, it was just funny because it’s more of a soap, the actual production, than what you see on screen. It’s all real. And then funny enough, people think that the dialogues in telenovelas are over the top, and Rodman always says that the first time he came to Guatemala and met my family, he’s like, “Oh my god, it’s real. The way people act, the way that people speak, it’s not exaggerated. These are real conversations that people have.” And I feel the same way. I think that telenovelas reflect reality in a way that people don’t even understand.

That’s fascinating. Oh my god. I’m sure we could have a whole hour of talking about telenovelas. And Rodman, how long have you been doing interiors now with RP Miller at this point?

RP: I think it’s 19 or 20 years. I think it’s 20 years. I was looking for an old invoice, or actually something got stolen from a client, and we were looking for an invoice for them, and I think it’s 20 years.

And how did you first get into design?

RP: Oh my god. I have wanted to do this since I was a little kid. I’ve been looking at and thinking about and drawing and doing this kind of stuff since I was able to draw, since I was able to look at things. And I grew up in a family that built houses and did decorate, did all that kind of stuff on their own. And so it was around me and I always kind of knew that I wanted to do it, but for a long time I got messages from people that it wasn’t a smart enough or a good enough job, or maybe it was too gay of a job, or something like that. I don’t think anyone was trying to… Well, actually no, I think they were trying to be really specific sometimes in their communication with me. That I would say to people, “Oh, I want to be a decorator.” And they would look at me and say, “Architect?” Or… Which somehow is maybe a more macho job or something. So for a long time, I just didn’t think it was a good enough thing to do.

And where were you from originally? Actually, I don’t know this.

RP: So my family’s from Los Angeles and I grew up kind of between a beach town outside of LA called Laguna Beach and a ski resort in the Rocky Mountains, Sun Valley, Idaho.

And Rudy, how did you decide to go help transition from telenovelas to Rick Owens furniture and studying at Harvard and all of that? How did that epiphany happen?

RW: Rodman and I moved to London when Rodman spearheaded the effort to reopen Phillips de Pury, the auction house. And while living in London, I was doing all these different projects, and we met Rick at a dinner party in a restaurant. And it was very funny, because I sat next to him and everyone in his group looked like Rick, like everyone was in leather and kind of gothy and I was in an Ann Taylor cashmere twin set. And I’m like, “Oh my god, what is Rick going to think?” I was so insecure. And we hit it off. We got along very well. And then a friend of mine was starting to work on a show in London, his first show outside of Paris, of his furniture. This is way back. He asked me, “Do you want to join? Do you want to help?”

I had fallen in love with the furniture, Rodman and I had bought a couple pieces, and it was something I was interested in. And because production is really about project management, if that makes any sense. It really is very linear and it’s very much about, the foundation comes before the wall, before the roof. And it’s the same, put together shows. It’s very much about producing the shows. And so I was thrilled to work with Rick and Michele and we did the show in London and it went very well. And then we did a couple of exhibitions alongside Rodman and Jeanne Greenberg from Salon 94 at Design Miami many, many moons ago before Rodman had even joined. I mean, that’s how Rodman met the team there and shows in New York. So it was a very funny transition and it was kind of like a hobby, and then it took over my life.

And what would you say, Rodman, you learned from your period at Design Miami about the world of design and how it was evolving? Because I feel like it’s evolved so much since the early days of the fair and the sort of world of collectible design, which you guys are now so in the middle of, and I would say trailblazers in. How did that… Over the period of time that you were there, how were things evolving and shifting?

RP: Well, I would take a step even farther back from Design Miami because I think that my role at Phillips in the early 2000s, and sort of reestablishing Phillips in London, and working so closely with the design department there, which I think was the true trailblazer for the collectible design market, at least on the auction side already, Ambra and Craig had started Design Miami and it was out there and that was this incredible aggregator of all of these incredible galleries that would come together. Phillips was the other bookend to that market that was presenting what was happening at Design Miami, plus a lot more vintage, plus blah, blah, blah, in a very public and aggregated way as well. And together, I think they were creating the platform, creating what was collectible design.

And I was working so closely with Alex Payne at the time, who was the director of Phillips design department. We were doing editions with Zaha, with Marc Newson. It was like this moment. And definitely Design Miami was helping create that market. And then when I came to Design Miami, I really got to see and spend so much more time with the gallerists really intimately and understand also all of their individual perspectives and their goals and what they wanted to do with their galleries, and hopefully through Design Miami, help them achieve that and reach new markets, reach more collectors. And I think working very closely and having on my committee as well, Patrick Seguin and Didier and Clémence from Galerie Kreo and sort of being around those great gallerists and those real pillars, I think, of the market really gave me perspective into what I think was a real seriousness.

That at a certain level, the auction houses, you’re just really trying to make sales and move things through. And there’s so many people that are in love with those objects, the specialists and collectors and everything, but it’s about movement. And at Design Miami, I think I was spending a lot more time and getting to hear a lot more connoisseurship, particularly from François Laffanour or from Suzanne Demisch or these people that really, really had dedicated a big part of their lives to getting to a point where they could be at Design Miami, that they could be participating, that they could be helping shape the market for Prouvé, for Parion, for all these… Maria Pergay. It really felt so collaborative and it felt… It’s not important in the world, but it felt important to all of these people, and it felt important to me that the fair was excellent or was the best that it could be to meet their expectations and to possibly push beyond those expectations.

RW: I think it’s also important to think about the last 20 years and what it has meant, first of all with economic cycles, right? So we moved to London and then there was a big crash, and then we’ve seen that come and go. That’s one. Social media has transformed everything, I think, and certainly the last 10 years has accelerated all things visual. And so I think there are a lot more people coming into the art market, into the design market. I think more people are seeing it and find it relevant. I think the pandemic had a huge effect on people being at home and thinking, “I want to live in a place that I love. I want to be surrounded by things. It no longer is okay to have a shoebox without a window because I’m going to be out all the time. Now I’m going to be in my home and I want to make it such.” And so I think all these forces have also propelled and highlighted the importance of design.

And, Rudy, tell me about this moment after Rodman leaving Design Miami, when you guys decided AGO Projects and what was that genesis moment and the fact that you guys would work together?

RW: I had started doing the curation, as we discussed, with Rick Owens and Salon 94 and shows here and there, but it wasn’t a full-time thing. I went back to school, I really thought … As Rodman said, we’re slightly nerdy, and I thought, “I really need to go deeper into this.” So I got into the GSD at Harvard and I did a degree in art and public space, but it was very open in how you went about creating your curriculum, which is the reason I did it as an old person or older person.

And it was a really transformative moment for me to really be surrounded by people that think and talk about design all day long, which is something I did but I wasn’t surrounded … I wasn’t able to have these conversations and maybe have theory and the books and the practitioners and have all these access and conversations. And so when I graduated, I think Rodman had felt that it was, as life goes in cycles, the cycle in Design Miami was coming to an end because he had done a lot and for a while. And so we thought, why don’t we move to the city we’ve always wanted to move to and try this crazy idea of working together and launching a gallery together.

And, Rodman, what made you kind of be like, “Yeah, I want to go on the other side. I want to now be a dealer and I want to do all the things that they’re doing.” And why Mexico?

RW: Rodman always wants to do everything because his brain is so discursive that he’s like, “Sure, I’ll do this, I’ll do that.” And if you come up to him and he’d like, “Do you want to cook tonight at a restaurant,” he’s like, “Yeah, sure, I’ll do it.” So it was me doing the convincing.

Rodman, is that true?

RP: Yes, it is true. I am a yes person. Yes is my middle name, though Rudy says it’s not my middle name in regards to him, but it is to everything else. I was really intrigued with the idea of being able to work closely with designers, and particularly some of the designers that we had met in Mexico City. Rudy and I have this long history, both family wise and just in our careers and things with Mexico, and we’ve moved every five years. And every five years we’ve looked at each other and said, “Well, should it be Mexico now?” And we didn’t do it.

And so this was this moment where we finally were like, “Okay, it’s now or never.” We were working on a project with Tatiana Bilbao, the great architect in Mexico that we didn’t end up building, but we were spending a lot of time … Rudy in particular were spending a lot of time with Tatiana in her office in Mexico, and we were going back and forth. And finally she looked at us and said, “I have a space for you for a gallery. And I have a space for you to come to Mexico and you keep saying you want to come to Mexico, so get on the train.”

And what was the scene like, Rudy, in Mexico City then, because it seemed like it was just on the up and up and on fire, if you would say, not literally on fire, but it was growing and booming and everyone was talking about it. And now it was right before everything really exploded.

RW: I was interested in starting a new conversation in design. It felt really sloppy and lazy for Rodman and I to just go take some designers that were already working with other galleries and starting a program. It felt like a great challenge to come to a region where there wasn’t really yet a network of galleries or really a market, to think about how we could capture and start a conversation.

When I got here, there’s a lot of designers, there’s incredible architecture happening in Mexico and throughout Latin America. Mexico is big enough that it can support a system, if that makes any sense. From where I come from in Guatemala it’s so small that you couldn’t really start something commercial. And so I came to do research and I started talking to people and of course, as you know, there’s networks of people. There’s also great universities and universities that are now focusing on design.

I met a couple of the curators. There’s two phenomenal curators here, Ana Elena Mallet that has a show right now, that has a show at MoMA. Which is a very big deal that there’s a Latin American design show at MoMA, because I think for a long time that has not been the case in that major US institution. And Cecilia León de la Barra, another curator and professor of design. And they really helped me when I would just come have conversations and say, “What’s happening? Can we discuss? Can we meet? Is there room for a gallery? Is there room to think about collectible design and design as something that people would want to buy alongside other objects that they collect, like art?”

And one of my favorite artists of yours that I learned about solely through you guys is Myungjin Kim from South Korea, but she’s originally born in South Korea but she lives in LA I believe. And I think she’s just a fantastic example of what you guys do and the eye that you bring. And I’m sure that you probably helped her developed her offering and her craft and what she was doing.

Tell me about her and if you could describe maybe, Rodman, her work to those listening that don’t know it.

RP: Well, Myungjin Kim is this very accomplished ceramicist, an artist in general, but most of the work that we’ve seen and that we’ve got out into the world at this point is work in clay. And she came to visit us a number of years ago, just right when we were starting the gallery, with our friends, Rodney and Taka from Nonaka-Hill, a great gallery in LA. She and her partner, Tony Marsh, who’s also another great figure in the ceramics world, had come to Mexico City on a trip and to come see the gallery and visit with us.

And we had a real connection with them at that moment. And then a few weeks later, MJ sent us some photos of some work that she had done.

RW: It was a little different. I was taking a deep dive on Instagram and I see MJ posting something, a little corner of something, and I’m like, “Rodman, we need to call her and you’re going to LA and you need to go visit her.” And then she said, “Look what Mexico inspired me to do,” which was using terracotta and doing a lot more free foreign vessels.

RP: She’d been working for many years and had recently been at Archie Bray, the incredible residency program in Montana, and had been working in porcelain, in these very, very tight, delicate porcelains. And Mexico, as it does to many people, infected her brain. It gave her a fever [inaudible 00:23:11].

She lived in Mexico? How did that happen?

RP: She didn’t live in Mexico, she just came to visit, just that trip when she came to Mexico City, just that trip flipped a switch. And she went home and she started producing these very exuberant, big, muscular pots and vessels that incorporate animals that she loves, like owls, and plants from her garden, these incredible cycads. Cycads are the oldest living genus of plant or something. They’re like something that were around during the dinosaurs, and she and Tony have this collection in their garden.

And so they started showing up on these pots. And they’re not just painted, they’re really sculpted into the pots. The pots are super … they have a great deal of relief and a great deal of energy. And she’s this tiny person starting to create these enormous pots, really, really big pots. And we’re so excited.

RW: She’s also deliciously obsessive compulsive like me. So we’ll have conversations in the morning and I’m like, “I think you should do this. I think you should do that.” She’s like, “Okay.” And then she pushes back or whatever. And at night she sends me pictures of things that she’s trying out already, and I’m like, “No, it was merely a suggestion.”

So we’ve really worked with her from the beginning of this series, and I think it’s just great to have … This is why we wanted to have a gallery, to have a relationship with people that we admire so much, whose process we can discuss and hopefully add something to and then bring it out to the world. Yeah, contribute to the process if we can. And it’s just a delight.

And I would say one of the things that struck me when looking at the roster of all the talents in your gallery that maybe is a little bit different than maybe five or 10 years ago, is that it seems to be … there’s very little distinction between art and design and photography, and you blend it all together in a way that feels very of the now. And I’m wondering, when you guys take on new talent, is there anything in common that you feel like is a must to take on somebody? Is there a common thread, even if it’s just personality wise?

RP: Wait, first I would say, Rudy, you can answer, but first I would say that I think Rudy and I both feel really strongly that the hierarchies that exist in our world, your world and my world, these very clear hierarchies, many of them I think in the last 30, 40 years predicated by the single mindedness around contemporary art and the lens of contemporary art and modern art. And how that lens has been applied across everything to the point that the word “decorative” is a distasteful word-

A four-letter word.

RP: … an ugly word.

It’s a four-letter word, yeah.

RP: A four-letter word.

I sometimes like to call people a decorative artist just to see the [inaudible].

RP: Let’s just see if they’re going to-

“I love the decorative arts here. This is so lovely.” And then people are like, “Ah.”

RP: And we are so anti that structure. I’ve spent so much of my life in the contemporary art world and in the art world and blah … I get that lens, but I don’t think that that lens is appropriate to blanket all of aesthetics.

And so I think both of us feel like all of these things, whether it’s something really beautiful that’s made in the mountains in Mexico or in a studio in Soho or around a kiln in Korea, if they’re beautiful and have real qualities about them, then they’re at the same level.

RW: And I’m a true believer that you’re an artist if you feel that you are, if you decide that you are and if you work as such. And so the manifestation of it comes in very different ways, and we see it and experience it a very different ways. I think for us, there’s an energy and an honesty with the people we work with. Everyone’s very interested in the process. They are interested in formally how things look, but they all want to find new ways of presenting things.

RP: And making things.

RW: And making things.

RP: They’re all interested in actual making, whether they’re making something or they’re going to a family that is fantastic weavers of palm and they’re going to figure out how to make this with something. I think there is definitely a through line with making and how things are made that is really attractive to us and everyone that we’re working with.

RW: I just saw this exhibition, the first exhibition from Loewe, the Spanish brand, in Shanghai that was designed by OMA, by Rem Koolhaas’s office and other designers in the office. And it was, for me, I had tears in my eyes. Because it was so funny, there were so many artists, artists presenting that make paintings, but there was a Puerto Rican artist from New York from the ’70s that instead of you seeing paint, used leather to make the paintings. It’s funny, it was in the first room as you walk in, and Rodman and I bought one years ago. And most people would question whether it’s a painting or not, and to me it is because he said that it was a painting.

And walking through that show and looking how much they’re supporting the idea of makers, and heightening into this exhibition that was really inspiring is more beautiful than most things I’ve seen in a long time. And so I think the world is morphing into that acceptance of not having hierarchies. I think the canon of art is also rightfully and finally including all these different practitioners that needed to be included. And so just because it’s not on a six-by-six canvas, it does not mean that it’s art or worthy of a museum exhibition or gallery exhibition. So for Rodman and I, it’s also how we think about things.

(SPONSOR BREAK)

Yeah, and how do you live with stuff? Do you have a hard time, saying, buying something and then putting it in your gallery versus just taking it home and never letting anyone else touch it?

RP: You have touched on something that is very profound and very difficult for us, because there is very often a moment … Even things come into the gallery and I will be like, “Oh no, no, that’s going home. I can’t sell that to anybody.” And Rudy will look at me and say, “No, no, no, the whole point is that this has to go to someone.” And I’m like, “I am someone. I am someone. It can come to me.”

But we are getting better probably at that, but I would say that we are very … We like to acquire and we have been doing so for so long, and it’s a very broad desire to have something. Bruno Bischofberger, the great dealer, once said to me literally 20 years ago or something, “Rodman,” and I’m paraphrasing, but he said, “Rodman, you’re not a collector until you have storage.” I mean, he’s the most incredible collector in the world. But I think that the idea that when you want something so badly and you can’t imagine living… You just can’t live life without that thing, even if you’re not going to see it every day, and even if you’re not going to touch it or something, you’re so in love with it, you-

RW: Well, there’s an energy, right? There’s an energy to them. And it’s not about expensive because I think Raman’s even referring to a beautiful $4 vase found-

RP: Yeah, totally. No, no. It can be like-

RW: Again, breaking the hierarchies. But I think also the beauty of objects, if they have this quality is that you’d just become a custodian for a while. Now that we see all these estate sales and you savor… People that put together great collections or great objects together, then if you can pass them on to a different generation, it’s just such a beautiful thing. And it’s almost a recording history also, right? It’s also, people will know what happened if someone collected or was able to amass a group of ceramics from 1980 in the US. You are recording history in a way, and if that gets dispersed eventually or it gets collected by a museum or whatnot, there’s something very interesting to be said about that in Design Miami once, many years ago by myself, I did a tiny little booth of ceramics, a group of ceramics from Guatemala from the ’40s, and they were used by families for get togethers and usually doing funerals.

And they’re very beautiful. They’re very humble, the way they feel. It’s like, they call it Guatemala majolica, but it’s much rougher than a majolica. And people responded really well to seeing a group of something and learning about how they were made, where they were made, why they were made, and how they were used. And so telling these stories is something that gives us, I think, rather than you would agree, great pleasure. And also sometimes we want to live with things because they have some kind of uplifting energy and it makes you happy to be around them at home.

Do you agree?

RW: I totally agree.

RP: And I also was thinking about the fact that was a dramatic pause. No, no. I was also thinking about the fact I sometimes get kind of frustrated with a client, not super frustrated, but a little bit frustrated when there’s the possibility that they can have something and they’re choosing not to have it, not to buy it. I’m just like, my brain doesn’t compute the idea that this thing that is so wonderful is available to you and you can afford it and you can buy it and you choose not to. My brain is like, I don’t understand what you’re saying.

RW: But that’s also a disease that we have, right?

RP: Yeah, totally. I mean, there’s a program for that.

RW: Yeah. I think it’s also a great privilege to be able to do this, right? It comes from a privilege, a place of privilege that you can think about this. And if you can’t buy that vase out a flea market, it’s a privilege, but also an honor to be able to own that and honor the person that made it.

RP: And use it hopefully. I mean, so much of what we want people to do too is not squirrel things away and hoard them and not use it. Really, we use everything that comes into our lives basically. And we, I think, have this conversation a lot with clients that are collecting good design and furniture, and it’s like I often think that, and I say, if you’re going to be super stressed about having this table and you’re going to need to have coasters out, and let’s not do it. If you’re going to be able to live with it and know that it’s going to get scratched and it might get a watermark and blah, blah, blah, all of that can get fixed. These things that are so beautiful to us that have patina, most likely people have just been using them as a desk and not thinking about it, so-

RW: Well, think about all the Chandigarh furniture that came from a school in India that was used by kids, right? So its first use was to be a rough use, right?

I will never forget when Pascale Musard once told me something is their mess, if it can be repaired, which I always thought was a very lovely-

RP: Oh, she’s the loveliest. And that’s such a nice sentiment.

It is, it is. And I keep remembering it to this day. But now onto your book, Love How You Live from Monticelli, which seems to sort of blend your knack for artisans and artists with sort being a good old-fashioned interior design book. It blends the two in a unique way where weaves in and out of these talents and the interiors. And how did you guys come up with this idea for the book and why presented in this way?

RP: Who gets to go first? I’m going to go first.

RW: You go first, Ron.

RP: One, because I wanted to say that we were so grateful that Billy Norridge from Monacelli commissioned the book from us and gave us a very open brief, what do you guys want to do? What kind of a book do you want to make? And I think Rudy and I both wanted to make sure that this book reflected a lot of what we’ve been speaking about already today of this kind of power of objects and how I think decorating and design work for us is so much more than just the way a room looks in a photo or the way a room looks to someone as they first walk into your house and are impressed by X and Y.

That we’re really interested in connecting with the way, both the way we’ve been living and the way our clients like to live and how design, interior design, if it’s done well, it’s elevating that and making that life better, making it a nicer experience to live in that space, but also that life is just better in general when you are aware of the qualities of objects and aware of the qualities of things that are totally irrespective of the brand name, this name, that name, blah, blah, blah.

It’s really like, why is this rug so wonderful? This rug is so wonderful because it’s been made in the mountains of Guatemala… That kind of storytelling and that kind of desire to bring things into your life that’s actually going to give it energy, we wanted the book to reflect that. And not just be a spread of a really great looking room with an important painting, with an important chair, with… The need to make it feel important, was not at the forefront and was almost like we wanted to work against that, I would say.

RW: I think a couple things. Also, we believe that our interiors are slightly more relaxed, again, with the change of generations and wealth and this and that. I think people are living in different ways now. Regardless of the size of home, people tend to gather, tend to be more informal. And I think our interiors reflect that, and we wanted the book to feel that way, not so structured. In all of our interiors, we commission from artists, designers, and craftspeople. And I think it was important to highlight who some of those people are, right? So in our book, we have a lot of interviews and photos from people we’ve worked with. And our friend in Venice has made incredible fabrics for us. And I think it’s an ode to her and her craft, but also just to show people how the conversation goes and where she lives and where she comes from, and what it looked like.

And so we have also highlighting designers and people we’ve worked with throughout the years that we think it’s kind of fun to include them and say, this is who they are. And someone say, well, you’re giving away who you’re working with, but the world is so small, and when Instagram nowadays, everybody finds everything out, right? So there’s no secrets. I think the secret is how you work with each individual to create something special for a project. I think that’s where the magic comes from. And so it’s our homes, because as I said before, we’re like gypsies. So there’s all the different places we lived in, from Guatemala to London to LA, to New York, and also houses that we’ve built for clients that hopefully it’ll show that our conversation and our relationship with those clients are very important to make something that is true to them.

RP: And I think that one of the underpinnings of our life, just the way that we live, is a true desire to collaborate. To be collaborative, and to collaborate across disciplines, across lifestyle, just the way that we are. And I’m hoping that the book reflects that spirit, both from the fact that I think our interiors are very collaborative with our clients and with each other, and then with all these makers that we want to bring into our world and to bring into the world of our clients. And very often it ends up that our clients have relationships with these people as well because they’ve fallen in love with the work that David Wiseman… David Wiseman is such a big part of our story and has been a collaborator with us for so long, and he has all these strong relationships with clients of ours. And I love that it feels interconnected and that it is interconnected for us.

RW: And when you have that collaborative spirit, when you highlight that, things I believe come out much nicer because everyone’s super happy to work together. So you need to give people credit. You need to come together and get rid of hierarchies of who’s allowed to say what or do what. And then magic comes out of collaboration. And I think that’s true across all fields and certainly in our gallery and our interiors. Raman, I think you would agree. I think an important thing also for us is that both Raman and I were raised by these incredible maternal grandmothers that were very concerned about how they lived. They were wonderful cooks, both of them, very different. One was in Laguna Beach, the other one was in Guatemala City, but they were always concerned about how they lived, in that it’s not just on a superficial level, but how they ate and how they treated other people and how, including-

RP: And not for Instagram’s purpose.

RW: Yeah. They were-

RP: Literally just for themselves. I think Rudy and I have talked about this before, and I think we even said it in the book, that it was this kind of post-aspirational. They weren’t trying to mimic someone else or trying to elevate, or I don’t know, climb. And so it just was… And they didn’t call themselves collectors, though-

RW: Neither one-

RP: Though, both of our grandmothers had all these beautiful things, but they didn’t walk around the world kind of with the labels that I think today everybody feels like they need to have and they just lived. But they were very aware of how they were living and how to make it better for our grandfathers, for us as grandchildren, for their friends. I mean, they were very engaged with all of it.

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And the projects in the book are kind of bursting with color and pattern, but I wouldn’t call it traditional at all, or I hate the word eclectic. And obviously being a design writer, I’m always struggling for words other than modern and eclectic and traditional, and have you guys ever-

RW: Unique, that’s the worst out of all words.

Unique. Unique. Sometimes I use unique. What have you guys ever came up with, like a phrase or a categorization of the look of rodent of your interiors and Rudy, this kind of your element in it with the gallery and all these collected pieces? What is this look?

RW: I mean, we’ve tried different things. At one point we kind of set urban safari meets preppy punk. I don’t know how that works, but yeah, it’s getting rid of hierarchies and trying things that we think are relevant. Layered is definitely an important word.

RP: Layered is definitely there. And I think ultimately, Dan, I think we really want all of these interiors to feel really special, but to not feel decorated in a professional way, which is so crazy to say as a professional. To be like, oh, I really hope that people think that an amateur did this or no one did this, but it just happened. But I think it’s driven by that thing about our grandparents and also experiencing all these wonderfully eclectic, to use that word, it’s almost like curated, which it means nothing but houses that really feel inhabited by interesting people.

RW: I was going to say layered, warm, human, approachable, inviting. Is that a nice word or is that overused?

RP: I was thinking about this the other day and speaking to a friend in LA and I was like, I think sometimes people don’t hire us because they end up spending a lot of money and it doesn’t look like they’ve spent a lot of money. Because I think neither Rudy nor I are driven by a desire for things to look rich or to feel like, oh wow, they have… Oh, my God, they’ve spent so much money. My ideal is no one has any idea that we’ve literally sold-

RW: We want people to think that-

RP: A million dollars on these stupid floors that look like they cost $8, like-

RW: You are exaggerating. But we want people to think that you’ve traveled, you’ve seen and you understand and you have a point of view, and there’s a through line and there’s a connection between objects and the art collection makes sense. And then it connects to the period or the reason why you have the rest. And so all of it comes together in a way that it feels personal.

RP: And local, very often.

Usually when we talk about publishing interiors, it’s usually that kind of magic is something you can’t fabricate or you can’t fake. I’m wondering if there was an element of a project in the book that looks like it cost eight cents, but really did endure? Something that really is deceptively ornate that you kind of only hiring someone like you guys to kind of pull off was able to happen, because normally these kinds of things that you are describing, they kind of just happen magically because an owner has good taste and it’s kind of hard to manufacture that. When a designer tries to, sometimes it looks really obvious, but is there something in a book that maybe you can be like, yeah, that looks like it just kind of came together, but really it was so difficult to make that?

RW: I can tell you, we created a movie theater for a home in Mexico, and it was-

Okay, how many seats? How big is this theater?

RW: It has a back row and then some-

RP: It seats 2020, at least.

RW: It was one of the most complicated rooms we’ve ever made. Everything had to be handmade. The panels on the wall, we had to find an artist. We commissioned in Yucatan all these woven pieces of straw to put on top of the wall. I mean, every single element was complicated, it was handmade, took a while, and it was a very… Don’t you agree Rodman? It was a very difficult room to execute. If you see it, you’d think it’s very simple.

RP: I would agree that that’s a good example of that, and then I was also thinking about, I love moving blankets, I really love them and I always want to upholster with them, but they literally fall apart and they’re made almost out of paper fabric or whatever. We have gone to great lengths to replicate moving blankets with Loro Piana, like linen and blah, blah, blah to do that. The idea is that it looks, and I want it to read like moving blanket, but in fact it’s taken months of work and it’s cost hundreds of dollars as a square inch to make this thing that looks like it’s super, like I took it out of the back of a truck. It sounds stupid, but it’s very often one of my favorite things to see in a room when I know that we’ve gone through a process.

In Kentucky, we really, really wanted the walls in the sitting room to look like we had just removed the old wallpaper, and what was basically left was the glue on the wall. Of course we did that, but it ended up looking not like that, it just looked gross, so then we spent months developing a wallpaper that sort of mimicked that idea of just leftover glue. Sometimes it is fun to kind of do something that’s very elaborate, that in our case looks as though it were just left there, forgotten.

You guys don’t ever repeat yourselves either, it looks like in the book that I couldn’t see any techniques or a chair or kind of a thing that looks like it’s been repeated.

RW: We are very self-conscious about not repeating.

RP: I think the only consistent thing through projects is our love of vintage textiles and the world of international textiles. I think that’s one of the few consistent things that we’re always making push and trying to figure out ways to use handmade and document fabrics and little bits and pieces of things, but otherwise, each house feels like it should tell a different story even for the same family. It’s a different location or it’s a different moment or something, and you want it to tell a fresh story. It’s so much more fun to start fresh.

RW: Also, as an opportunity to meet an amazing maker, an amazing artist, to do something new. That’s part of our excitement to do it in tiers is that some mobile say, I really want to create metal panels for the entrance store. That process of finding someone that could do it is so exciting to us, that we take it on as challenges for each of the projects.

You guys are, I would consider yourselves as great nurturers of talent and you know how that works, and you guys are great boosters also as well. There are a lot of designers listening and artists listening, I’m sure, as I know many do. What advice would you give them to navigating making it today in this world of just, I don’t even know how to describe today’s world.

RP: Well, one, I would say, this is going to sound glib but I’m going to say it. It’s like, get good at Instagram. Literally, Instagram is so important and social media is so important in terms of getting people to see your work, and I think a lot of discoveries are made there, so that’s just a basic thing.

RW: I think that people should really focus on what they’re proposing, what they’re bringing forth to the world, and take the time to do something that’s personal. I think part of the problem of having so much on Instagram that then you see everything and you want to edit everything into one thing and it starts looking like a round pink sofa, right? That’s not what’s going to make you successful, is finding your individual language that’s going to create a moment of reflection of people, it will stop me from the scroll or in the visit or when I go to a fair and there’s all the young designers.

It’s that one piece that will look different and very personal and it adds something to the story of design today that I think will make people want to work with someone. For me, I’ve worked with designers where they’ve only created a chair, one chair, but that there’s something so impressive and different and thoughtful about that one piece that you think, okay, there’s something here, there’s something that we should keep mining, there’s something that we should keep looking at and iterating because this mind, this wonderful mind or minds that have come together to do this, have it in them to increase what they do, to really blow it out of the water.

RP: I think, Rudy, you said something that I think we talk about a lot, which is this kind of language of a designer, of a particular designer or an artist that it’s so important to realize that you are stringing together words and phrases through designing objects and you’re creating a universe and it is very much like creating a language and an alphabet and a group of words and sort of being really thoughtful about how those things kind of relate to each other, I think is important, and I think the more that a designer is able to create a world, it doesn’t have to be big, it doesn’t have to be huge, it’s just creating enough of a full picture to realize like, oh, this person really is speaking this way and speaking through these materials and the way these materials combine, and it is a different language than someone else that may be using similar materials, but it becomes a very specific language, and once that language is established, it’s really, really fun to come along and to be able to help that person write novels, to create something more bigger.

RW: I think there’s no excuse for not doing your homework. When we were kids, when I was a kid, I had no access in Guatemala, there was no internet, there were no magazines, the library didn’t have design books. I mean, it was very difficult. The educational process was, you really needed to go out to learn, right? Nowadays, there’s no excuse for not knowing at least basic history of design. You don’t have to repeat it, you can go against it, but I think you have to know it.

I read that you guys have a small place in Guatemala, is that true? Do you still have that place?

RW: That’s right, yes.

I’m just curious, what’s a perfect weekend? Where in Guatemala is it, and describe for me a perfect weekend?

RW: My whole family lives in Guatemala City, that’s where I was raised, and so our place is half of my mother’s home. My childhood home ended up being too big for her. It’s like a U-shaped house, so we split it in the middle and we each have L’s. Rodman and I redid it. Our perfect weekend, weirdly is to just stay at home the whole entire weekend because we love it so much. There’s one main big room where the kitchen is in that room and the living room and the fireplace and whatnot, and Rodman and I tend to just stay there all day, cook, invite friends, read. We have a large dining room table, so we start doing projects there. We start designing, we start drawing, we work on our computers. Our perfect weekend is just us at home. We’ll invite people, we’ll do a dinner or two, but it’s a lot of downtime, and of course, my mother is so excited to have us there that she’s always there and she doesn’t want us to leave because we’re both mama’s boys and our mothers really want to-

RP: Well, the houses connect like The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe style, literally you go through a wardrobe from one wardrobe to another through these two houses. Really, the houses are connected. I will tell you, Dan, that we were in Waltham I think, not last Christmas, but the Christmas before for 12 days, and I only left the house twice. I was just being conscious of that.

RW: Garden, there’s a garden there-

RP: We kind of garden, and I cook so much, and I love to cook. That kitchen is just probably my favorite kitchen to cook in, partly because it’s so integrated to everything else.

RW: I work a lot on the garden every single day to change things, to improve things, to see how things are going. We just spend a lot of time at home.

I have a question for you, Rodman, or for both of you, if something were to go horribly wrong at the gallery, who do the staff call first?

RP: Oh, definitely Rudy.

RW: Me.

RP: Oh my God, no one ever calls me, I’m like the last person. However, Rudy, you have to admit that this is true. I’m an excellent person in a moment of crisis. I’m super, super calm. I’m like the most common. When I’ve worked at the auction houses, I was always the person that people would come to when a client was just like having a meltdown. They were like, okay, Rodman, you’ve got to deal with it, you’ve got to call this person, or you’ve got to deal with this thing. I’m really good at the crisis management part of it.

RW: To stay level-headed, I am trained in soap opera production, so I take it to really dramatic levels at all times, and it feels very comfortable to me. I think it’s normal to be that dramatic. Rodman can be very level-headed, and it will give me the pause to come back to myself, but yes, I will get the call.

Okay. I mean, you should work in magazines, it seems like you guys would be, Rudy, you’d be right at home with all the drama. What’s next for you guys?

RP: Well, immediately what’s next is that we’re going for the first time on a really extended vacation. Rudy and I are going on Safari with his family-

RW: My mother of course, because my mother wants to have-

Where are you guys going?

RW: We’re going to Kenya and Tanzania. My mother, we have not traveled together as a family for a very long time so we’re going on a family vacation to Safari. I always say it might be like a reality show where we all show up and some people might not come out, but we’ll see how it goes.

Do you think you’ll collect anything on Safari? Do you think you’re going to come back with something?

RW: I don’t know if one collects on Safari, they only allows us each to carry 30 pounds, which is nothing. That includes backpack, camera and whatnot, so I don’t know. I’m sure we’ll find a way.

RP: I want textiles, obviously. I mean, I will always find a way. I will start wearing them, like stuffing my clothes with cloths.

RW: We need to work on the book and interiors. We have new projects, which is always exciting. At the beginning of every project, there’s a big moment of visualizing. You can call it a mood board, which rodman and I tend to do, they’re like notebooks where we want to set the tone via references, via sketches, drawings, renders and whatnot, and so we have to put together two or three of those, and those take a long time.

Rodman, can you describe for me AGO Projects and your world in three words, what would it be?

RP: Stimulating, rewarding, happy making. I don’t even know if that’s a word, but I’m making it a word.

It’s not, but we’ll let it slide this time. Rudy?

RW: Collaboration, experimentation, amplification.

Thank you to my guest today, Rodman and Rudy, as well as to Alexander Galan 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, and follow me on Instagram @danrubinstein. Don’t forget to follow The Grand Tourist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen, leave us a rating or comment, every little bit helps. Til next time!

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