Roman & Williams (Wallpaper)

Published March 2007

‘I want to see a world of flesh and bone,’ Robin Standefer, principal, with husband Stephen Alesch, of New York-based architecture and design firm Roman & Williams says on a Thursday afternoon, sitting at her office's long and thoroughly beaten-up conference table, one she crafted out of recovered wood and un-matched industrial legs. "A world of food, architecture, design, sex."

Five years ago, a little movie called Zoolander came out. Revered among the college set, admired by nearly everyone who saw it, the film was remarkable as much for its set design—skate ramps in the apartment, superfuturistic day spas—as it was for its quotability. Ben Stiller, who played the ‘really, really, ridiculously good-looking’ male model Derek Zoolander, loved what production designers Standefer and Alesch had done, and hired them to work on another movie of his, Duplex. The movie bombed, but it cemented Stiller's relationship with the pair. When the time came to renovate his Hollywood house, he called Robin.

Stiller was right on the money; Standefer had been wanting to get out of film and focus on designing and building something that would last longer than a six-week shoot. Alesch, who had worked in architecture for eight years before turning to set design, was a perfect partner. He did the drawings; she oversaw the big-picture. The pair opened a tiny office in LA, finished the house on time, and the rest reads like something out of a Hollywood fairy tale. The actresses Kate Hudson and Elisabeth Shue hired the team to do their houses too, and then, as Standefer says, ‘it got hot’.

So hot that Standefer wanted out of the fire, and back to her native New York. Alesch agreed: ‘I loved New York, I was ready to go back and just continue’, and the two opened Roman & Williams (their grandfathers' surnames) with a staff of four. Two years later, they run a 2,500-square foot office with 24 employees, which, along with their nearby apartment, operates as a testing ground for the avatars of their shared taste; taxidermy, Chinese calendars, wildcat skeletons, ancient apothecary jars, geometric weights, machined ship parts, a piece of amethyst, another of anthracite, and a huge block of solid silver, all of which, re-purposed and re-installed for today, fit into Standefer's philosophical interpretation of "modern." Loosely, her understanding comes out as "the opposite of abstraction." 'In the most basic sense, I believe that it's what we're doing now, because we're doing it now,' she says.

The firm is currently working on a spa for a Jean Nouvel-designed apartment building at 40 Mercer, a restaurant for überhotelier Andre Balasz' New York Standard, a renovation of a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Pleasantville, an LA sushi restaurant, a line of Forty Deuce burlesque clubs all over the country, and, finally, their piece de resistance, 215 Elizabeth, a seventeen-unit residential brick building in Manhattan's Nolita neighborhood. Big news: the Ghent Realty-developed structure will be the first vernacular brick building to be constructed in Manhattan in 75 years.

‘When we get this building built, it will be a breakthrough,’ Standefer says of the project, which broke ground in January and will be finished by the end of 2007. ‘I think it's pretty badass.’ Asked whether she is challenging the professional culture to account with this time-consuming and expensive construction, she demurs, but admits that the duo do want to make a statement: ‘We want to say, ‘You can do this. Stop excusing the schlock.’ Alesch is equally committed to the project, but sees it as a way of gently coaxing their contemporaries. ‘It comes from a love for New York, and its vernacular, and its discipline,’ he says. ‘It's about taking creativity, and just bridling it a little bit, and having to be much more subtle with these tiny details.’

Not having gone through the typical sequence of an architect's career—school, more school, join a massive corporate firm, burn out, start a small firm with poached clients—the pair hasn't been ruined by the particular difficulties of the profession. Having started in film rather than architecture, Standefer says that their work is far more ethos- than style-based. And whereas architects are so frequently taught to doubt their every move, to never trust their first (or second, or third) instincts, Standefer and Alesch have a refreshing faith in their ideas.  The actual creative work, Standefer argues, comes from lightbulb moments – and if both she and Alesch feel strongly drawn to an idea, they'll go with it.  That said, she points out that it's the ‘decades in your brain’ spent thinking about all of these things that give those  moments their own particular legitimacy. ‘We love the trade more than we love intellectualizing architecture and design,’ Alesch adds. ‘We just love craft.’