Hospitality Design - December 2011 - 64

perspectives

interview: avroko

you can’t vent out in this building, we still put ﬁreplaces in there, because they feel really good. We warmed up some of the rooms with color. We’ve got a beautiful shade of red that’s on all of the walls downstairs in the wine cellar room. You feel hugged when you’re in that room. And then part of the cutting up the spaces, too, is that residential feel, but it was because it feels so great when you’re in a little bit more intimate space, and you feel anchored in your the seat. AF: Put guests in a place that they intrinsically feel good, even if it’s not hitting them over the head, and they say, ‘OK, I want to be in here.’ We used old barn wood—just having that kind of patina that immediately sets a tone. But instead of laying it up in a manner that is replicating that, we tried to tighten it up into almost a modern plane, so it’s just a very clean plane of wood that runs down the middle of the space. We used the posts at the end of each stable to identify a rhythm for our main room, the bar room. So that at the end of each of those Pullman booths, there is a post with a newel at the top of it. The lighting ﬁxtures have all been detailed out in a manner using really hyper-reﬂective glass that shoots light throughout and gives this sense of glowing without being too over-thetop. One of the real strengths is even though it was rooted in the late nineteenth century in terms of these kinds of residential-y, tavern-y stables, we also then did a mash-up by bringing in some ideas from the twenties and thirties, namely pulling in some detailing and some materiality from the Bauhaus movement. HD: How was it creating your own whiskey? AF: The tasting is awesome. KO: Right. The process of creating it? Awesome. Since then, we’ve been working on a bunch of different kinds of ideas. One of which we can’t release the name, but we’ve located a soda brand that’s fallen out of the public eye and are reviving it. And with the whiskey and the soda, and we’re doing additional alcohol brands too—Madam Geneva [the bar off of Saxon+Parole] was the slang name for a gin in London at the turn of the century and in January we are launching the Madam Geneva gin—we want to be part of brands that we want to take a second look at. It’s the beginning of a longer process for us. HD: With an ofﬁce in Hong Kong and a soon-to-open production HD: Speaking of a different process, the ﬂagship store of Frye is one of the handful of retail spaces you have done. KO: It’s crazy. It’s the oldest boot brand in America and it’s never had a store before. It’s had these waves of popularity. It was huge in the seventies and then in the nineties and then even more recently, they had another renaissance and were ready for their ﬁrst ﬂagship store. GB: As Kristina was saying, oddly enough, this is their ﬁrst store they have had since 1862. It was about trying to ﬁnd a good position for what the brand wanted to be. The owners right now see it as one thing, and we did a lot of research, and we talked to a lot of people about how they saw it, too. There are a lot of different people who are really dedicated to Frye boots. There’s kind of a motorcycle thing, there’s a very urban side to it, and the owners saw it as a bit of a Western brand, too, but we tried to steer them a little bit away from that because we thought that was a bit too limiting. But there are some nods to that in the store as well. What we started focusing on was the main thing everyone kept outﬁt in Bangkok, you have a lot of projects happening in Asia. Is there one that ﬁts the real revival concept? WH: The heritage project in Bangkok is part of the new W hotel complex on Sathorn road. It’s a hundred-year-old estate with four interconnected buildings and a big open courtyard in the middle. It was originally a royal Thai residence done in a very western style, then the Royal Siam hotel, and then for the last sixty years the Russian embassy, and for the last eight years it has been vacant and falling into disrepair, so this is a restoration project with a lot of government attention as it’s a historical site. So we are both renovating it back to its original splendor and taking pains to be historically accurate, and then we are also modernizing it to bring a contemporary Thai/Bangkok urban aesthetic into the four monster suites, restaurant, lounge, outdoor, and club areas. Although it is part of the W development, it will have its own identity and be something very special and unlike anything else in Bangkok. talking about: the quality of the craftsmanship and how long these things lasted and how they respected the overall workmanship that went into them. We went with the concept that this was all about the craftsman and his shop and the tools of the trade—anyone from a millworker to a shoemaker to a furniture maker. The store really celebrates that through the artifacts. The back of the space has two little areas, one of which we termed ‘the raw room,’ which is really about the raw materials that might go into any making of something. Then the adjacent room was those materials turned into this ﬁnished space. So you literally see this stack of walnut that becomes one of the display cases for the boots and shoes to sit on. And then the opposite room is just a very lush, ﬁnished room of cabinetry, with the shoes really highlighted. And that’s going to become their room that they’re going to highlight a lot of their heritage products because for their one-hundred-and-ﬁftieth year anniversary, they’re planning on reissuing all of their older products. And they’ve got some crazy schedule, like two new heritage products a week for the entire year. There are a lot of custom light ﬁxtures; a lot of the furniture is custom as well. And each piece talks about a different aspect of this craftsman’s workshop in some way.

Above: The craftsman’s workshop-inspired Frye store in New York (photo by Roger Hagadone).

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