Hospitality Design - December 2011 - 62

perspectives

interview: avroko

KO: I think that the story was so compelling that we couldn’t not do it. A lot of people had been negotiating for this building, and the owner was super passionate about it. He had bought it from Muriel Fagiani, who was the daughter of the fellow who made it famous, and she said, ‘I’m putting this building in your care. I want you to revive it. I want you to preserve it.’ He felt like he had been given a responsibility. All these people came in to negotiate—Thomas Keller was trying to get it for a new restaurant. It’s such a historic building, everyone in Napa knows it, and everybody’s been waiting to see what happens with it. We talked to him and we said, ‘We want to keep the brand. We want to establish that Napa history and keep it, and do something fun, but pay homage.’ And so we got it. He’s kind of a lover of history, too, so he’s redoing every piece of this building and the structure of it before we even get in there. It’s really rare that you get something with so much depth and history attached to it. AF: Nick Fagiani, Muriel’s father, was a winemaker in Napa in the twenties and thirties. He was delivering ‘grape juice’ to the gangsters during Prohibition. He bought this building to have a place for him and all of his friends to be able to come and hang out and drink, called Fagiani’s Cocktail Bar and Liquor Store. He was just this amazingly colorful character in Napa, and it was a beacon for the community. He had twin daughters, and he ushered them into running the business in the late sixties and early seventies. Then Muriel’s sister was closing up one night when she was attacked and killed by a robber. Muriel came in the next day and found her sister, and literally boarded it up that very day. It’s been closed since. In a weird little twist, literally like the day after we signed the lease, they caught the guy that did the crime. It’s going to be a fun project to operate; we’re going to do something that’s very community-based and very accessible, and a place that people can just fall into and get a great cocktail and a great beer. We’re reviving the spirit of the fact that it was a cocktail bar. HD: So let’s transition to your other self-propelled project

Above: Madam Geneva, the bar off Saxon+Parole, named after a slang word for gin in London at the turn of the century (photo by Michael Weber).
about [the horse] Parole. And we heard about Saxon, too, although he’s a little bit less famous than Parole—he has got such a great story. Then Adam was talking about the stables [in the late 1800s], which were dotting every free space in downtown Manhattan. And every rich man in Manhattan had his horses that he would race. So we combined what was happening at the turn of the century in Manhattan, and some of these ideas that we had gotten from Tuxedo. We could have done miles and miles of ideation just on Parole, because he’s so cool. He’s the perfect underdog, not meant to be a particularly successful racehorse. He was pretty much expected to lose at every turn, and he kept surprising everybody by winning. Then we came across the idea that of course, there were Parole billiard halls, there were Parole sports clubs, there was Parole whiskey. And so we decided that would be a good starting point, to make our own whiskey. And we hadn’t produced an alcohol independently before, so that was one of the ﬁrst stepping-stones. AF: Those social clubs were literally all up and down the Bowery, and in the seedier parts of Manhattan. It really was an everyman story, in that it sort of took on a life of its own in the late 1800s. We love the idea of just tapping into that. It was literally Seabiscuit before Seabiscuit. There’s a beautiful dichotomy and a story between Saxon and Parole— the big gorgeous racehorse, and then Parole, the really scraggly little racehorse. HD: Can you talk about some of the key highlights of the design? AF: We were trying to cut the space up a bit more, and create a series of experiences that were smaller rooms, that were slightly more residential in character. We were looking at the late nineteenthcentury structures that were these collections of smaller spaces. And everything is pronounced, very strongly axially lined out—so strong centerlines, strong sense of views, and a sense of arrival and crossing through thresholds. All these things that are innate in residential architecture. We were tapping into the spirit that this is an old tavern, or somebody’s house. KO: It was really very simple and was very much about what makes you feel good in a space, period. And so part of that is feeling like home, part of that is having the warmth of ﬁreplaces. Even though

Saxon+Parole, formerly known as Double Crown. AF: I was joking about saying we were bored, but we were a little bored. We had come up with this idea for Saxon and Parole, and we knew we had something that was just going to be phenomenal. We were looking at our current situation, and we couldn’t quite get enough money raised, we couldn’t quite ﬁnd the right real estate, and we were like wait a minute, ‘Why don’t we just use one of our existing spaces?’ And Double Crown was the one that we decided to use because of a number of reasons: the size, the overall layout, partially as well because it had run well for three years but we knew that the Bowery was changing, and the new concept was probably a bit better suited for the area. HD: How did you come up with the concept? KO: There’s always a personal connection when we start. I had been doing a lot of history research on these stone stables in Tuxedo, New York [where I have a house]. And Adam is always doing a bunch of history research, too, on New York City. In one of our dialogues I was talking about Pierre Lorillard, who is the founder of Tuxedo Park, and that he was a huge horse guy. And in these travels, we had heard

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Hospitality Design - December 2011