Boutique Design - June 2013 - 32

5

RENAISSANCE MAN-AGER

6

5 Decorated wall panels
contrast with pure color
blocks in the windows of
Stacked Los Angeles.
6 Every aspect of FF&E
becomes an objet d’art
in Americas River Oaks
restaurant in Houston.

J

ordan Mozer has become a champion for creative types who don’t
want to run with the pack. His firm,
Jordan Mozer and Associates Ltd.
(JMA), blends the disciplines of architecture, fine art, product design,
manufacturing and interior design.
His success with off-the-grid solutions
for projects as diverse as New York’s
Renaissance Times Square, Hamburg's
East Hotel, Houston’s Americas River
Oaks restaurant and his signature “ear”
chairs have helped to show there’s a
new line in the sand for artistic integrity that still works for clients.
“We put everyone in a room with
pencils and say, ‘What alternative

models are there? How can we see
the problem differently?’” he says.
“The mandate is: Question everything. There is no wrong answer.
Show, don’t tell.”
Lots of firms do that. What they
don’t do is to use method acting
constructs to inspire their teams to
write rich visual scripts. Nor do they
give their designers a tool kit that
includes a workshop where they
can create and build (or help build)
furniture and other products and a
budget for R&D and experimentation. Another carrot is JMA’s policy
of directly rewarding “intuition and
improvisation.”
Once suggestions are on the table,
he and his fellow JMA partners, Karen
Lilly Mozer (his wife), and architect
Jeff Carloss, sit down with the staff to
figure out how to make those ideas
work on time and on budget. “The
best way to get buy-in from clients is
to solve business issues before you
push innovation,” he says.
JMA begins each project by translating business plans, code studies
and detailed operational interviews
into a series of alternative floor plans.
“Jeff Carloss, my business partner of
21 years, and I might lay out three or
four alternative kitchen equipment
plans to achieve versatile efficiency
in both the kitchen and dining room,

or iterate six building schematics in
a search for the most desirable guest
room configuration,” says Mozer. He
makes that process of thinking and
rethinking transparent. “Managers
have to involve their staffs in brainstorming, but they also have to teach
them how to find rational solutions.
Design is a marketing strategy that
distinguishes a project in a way that
eliminates head-to-head competition.”
That’s why mentoring is an integral part of managing at JMA. Mozer
says he was fortunate to have found
a series of mentors after his father
died, including the resourceful people
closest to him.
“My family has a lot of moxy.
My grandparents emigrated from
England, Sweden, the Ukraine and
Austria and reinvented themselves in
the United States. My father moved
to Chicago when he was 14 and chose
medicine instead of the family business in Denver with his brothers. He
died when I was 15. My mother, an
artist, converted her studio-gallery
into a luxury-goods store, which grew
to six outlets. She traveled to Europe
and Asia to design and purchase
products. It became clear that guts,
hard work and creativity could solve
big problems and that every moment
had to count.”
—Mary Scoviak
For more from Mozer, go to boutiquedesign.com

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E L I Z A M OZ E R ( M OZ E R ) ; D O U G S N O W E R ( 5 , 6 )

JORDAN MOZER
http://www.boutiquedesign.com http://www.boutiquedesign.com
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