Hospitality Design - November 2013 - 54

2. Brick walls and sliding
industrial doors in the
bar area of PUBLIC,
AvroKO's first selfpropelled project which
swept the design
category of the 2004
James Beard Awards.

3. An old-fashioned card
catalog crafted from
wood instills PUBLIC
with a library feel.

2
Even though we'd been working together
for years, and we were doing more than
ever in our individual collectives, the idea of
creating a company in the formal sense was
never seriously on the table. For the longest
time, it didn't feel like something we actually
needed to do, considering how organic our
collaborations were. We all had previous
experiences working with firms, and any
trappings of typical corporate growth didn't
feel appealing.
We never thought about professional
or profit-driven success, as much as
encouraging each other-as friends-to put
our biggest aspirations out there so we could
find ways to realize them as a group. We
would meet up and have discussions, often
over a cheerful bottle of wine, and Kristina
would ask: What's your big dream? If
anything were possible, what would you do?
And that's how PUBLIC, our first
designed, owned, and operated restaurant
came about. The restaurant had been a
longtime interest of Adam's. He was turning
thirty, and it had been on his mind for years.
I've always been drawn to the hospitality
industry. I've always worked within it in some
way. When I was washing dishes at age sixteen,
and when I was bartending and running around
until five in the morning, living in London, I
loved it. And when I was cooking in a kitchen,
and cutting and burning myself, I loved it. There
were just so many things: the sounds, the sights,

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November 2013 hospitalitydesign.com

the smells, the space, the tastes-it's just the
epitome of being full of life. -Adam
As owners, we had possession of the
whole process beyond the design. We were
able to curate the full experience: the music,
the staff, the full living entity that it became.
It was an exhilarating process. We pushed
ourselves and each other to take a lot of
risks, though we didn't necessarily recognize
them as risks at the time-they looked a lot
more like opportunities for fun. Being a little
naïve was probably one of the best things we
had going for us. Even now, after all these
years, we're obviously more aware of the
pitfalls and risks, but we still approach our
projects with a bit of a 'what if...' mentality.
That project, which opened in 2003,
became a way for us to break in and do the
kind of work we wanted to do-from top
to bottom, from the branding to the buildout-but at its very core, it was about coming
together to make someone's dream a reality.
And that's been the case ever since.
We have an annual tradition we refer to
as 'magic paper.' It's a list we individually
make involving our latest dreams.
Everybody then supports each other in
attempting to get two to four things done
off the collective magic papers. It's both a
gratifying reflection on the past year, and
an exciting way to look forward to the new
one to see how the lists change annually,
and how we can achieve more as a group by

3

supporting each other's individual ambitions.
Those lists are the reason why our projects
have become widely varied over the years,
and global as well.
There's a certain egalitarian notion
within a lot of firms that every idea is the
company's idea, and to some extent that
comes across with AvroKO as well. We are a
family who very much eats from the same
table (literally and figuratively), but we've
made a lot of sacrifices for each other, too.
In order for this connected model to work,
we each have had to put the other's personal
needs, creative freedom, and financial desires
ahead of our own in order to help see another
partner's dream to fruition-all while having
complete trust that one day something off of our
own list is going to get done, too, at the same level
of support. I think that's unusual. It's possibly
utopian community-building at its best, and the
business is a beautiful result of that notion.
-Kristina hd
http://www.hospitalitydesign.com
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