This article was also published in the Financial Times.
Kristina O’Neal and Adam Farmerie are exceptional in the restaurant world in that they are restaurant designers turned restaurateurs. Their New York-based architectural and design firm AvroKO has been so innovative that they have seen their designs appear in Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore and India, as well as all over the US.
Surprisingly, when I asked them out for lunch in New York, instead of choosing one of their own restaurants, they booked a table at Caffé Falai, a gem of an Italian restaurant that specialises in baked egg dishes and pasta, close to their offices in NoHo. ‘Most of our restaurants don’t do lunch,’ Farmerie explained. ‘They’re either nightspots or too far uptown for us.’
But as I looked around, it quickly became obvious why this interior appeals to Farmerie so much that he admitted he had almost been addicted to the place for a year. The walls are covered in mirrors that would give a sense of familiarity and comfort to any customer while the three chandeliers over the counter that divides those eating at the bar from the hard working chefs add the sophistication, a memorable point of difference between a bowl of spaghetti round your own kitchen table and one in a restaurant.
What distinguishes their design approach can best be summed up in the title of their hefty design lexicon, Best Ugly (Collins). This sees Farmerie and O’Neal, with their colleagues William Harris and Greg Bradshaw, looking at spaces that their restaurateur clients introduce them to and deliberately salvaging what would have been otherwise immediately discarded, reusing it to good effect. ‘Often we end up doing more of a reskinning rather than a full renovation,’ Farmerie explained.
A current successful example of this approach is Quality Meats on W58th Street (pictured above) which rose on the site of the former Manhattan Ocean Club after only three months’ work, with the most elegant surfaces modern workmanship can produce juxtaposed with ruggedly exposed brickwork. This sat comfortably with a menu dominated by hefty meat cuts.
Their current project, transforming two floors of what O’Neal described as a ‘non-descript office building’ in Hong Kong into a hip new restaurant is presenting them with no shortage of ‘ugly’ but the local businessman funding it clearly sees them as ‘best’. [I have no names here.] In London Russell Norman was inspired by their book, and their restaurants in New York, to borrow their principles for his highly acclaimed Venetian wine bar in Soho, Polpo.
O’Neal was quick to admit that inspiration for the Best Ugly idea had come from her travels in Asia and particularly from looking at gardens in China where one ugly plant will be intentionally positioned to accentuate the beauty of the others around it. But the roots of the subsequent symbiosis between AvroKo and restaurants are unusual.
All four, two designers and two architects, met 20 years ago at university, became friends and then, rather like musicians, regrouped. London played an influential role in this period as Farmerie subsidised his year at the Architectural Association with nights working behind bars as cocktails began to boom while his younger brother, Brad, was nearby working as a chef for Peter Gordon at Providores.
AvroKo’s future direction was then determined by a rather idealistic list. The four partners wrote down those projects they wanted to tackle that would ask the most of themselves but not necessarily be determined by their clients. One partner wanted to design a fashion line (AvroKO has just launched a womenswear range); another yearned to design furniture; the one [I have asked] who is now commuting from New York to their Bangkok office proposed working in Asia as his ideal; while a much closer involvement in restaurants was a resounding priority for all.
Having Farmerie’s younger brother as a chef gave AvroKO the impetus to cross the line from being purely architects and designers to opening their own restaurants in downtown New York. In 2003 they opened the 1930s-inspired Public and the next door Monday Room with its emphasis on wine and food pairings, both hotspots, followed last year by the funky, bustling Double Crown with the bar Madam Geneva attached.
As they spoke of these joint roles, the language that Neill and Farmerie employed moved from the more rarified and subjective, that seems to be the hallmark of architects, to the more practical. Designing with utility rather than simply form in mind has led them to appreciate more fully the importance of the flow of service. And, they realised, restaurants look their best when they are full of people, even if this does add to the potential clutter.
Both O’Neal and Farmerie admitted that working for top restaurateurs and chefs, such as Alan and Michael Stillman in New York and Michael Mina on RN74 in San Francisco, had not only made them better designers as they continue to appreciate the ‘ballet of space’ which they believe restaurant interiors represent, but also better restaurateurs themselves. And so far, they added, without any conflict of interest.
This may well be due to their obvious passion for their second career. While O’Neal spoke enthusiastically about the time she now spends at the flower market buying for the restaurants, Farmerie laughed as he spoke of the long shifts he had put in at their restaurants after a day in the practice although this seems recently to have given way to a passion for stints in the basement infusing vodka for his customers.
Now at work on their nineteenth restaurant, O’Neal believes that their approach is moving on, that Best Ugly has had its day because of ‘the customer’s empathy for nostalgia, and as we look for new ways to express ourselves’. So they are now more inclined to look at history, for inspiration. Madam Geneva, for example, takes its name and drinks list from a book on the gin craze that swept England in the 17th century. .
Should Farmerie achieve his next, personal ambition and design restaurants in London, its history is bound to provide him with many more exciting reference points.
AvroKO, www.avroKO.com