Eva Hagberg

The Storytellers (Architect's Newspaper)

Published April 16, 2008 (link)

“We like to think of ourselves as the most open-minded clients we’re going to have,” said Greg Bradshaw, principal of the downtown architecture/interiors/fashion/book/concept/ethos/lifestyle/design firm AvroKO, which he heads along with Kristina O’Neal, Adam Farmerie, and a very tired—that evening, at least—William Harris. The four of them were sitting at the end of the bar at PUBLIC, their first venture as their own clients, and were talking about everything from the just-completed transformation of the restaurant Park Avenue Winter into Park Avenue Spring (on which Harris has been working non-stop), to their plans for a new restaurant on the rapidly gentrifying Bowery, to joking about what exactly O’Neal’s SAT scores were, and what exactly they mean.

The four, who met when they were eighteen, each have different approaches, personalities, and skills, but together they make up a coherent and collaborative whole. Initially, however, they operated as two firms, Avro Design (Bradshaw and Farmerie) and KO Media Studios (O’Neal and Harris). After many years of collaborating, the two firms merged while working on PUBLIC. Their ethos is research-driven as much as it is fantastical, interpretive as much as creative, and conceptual as much as style-conscious. The firm has become known mostly for its historically referential restaurant design, clear in everything from the Lower East Side’s Stanton Social, which adopted the neighborhood’s long history of tailoring with a herringbone-riffing wine wall, to PUBLIC—the restaurant they own and above which they work—where they took the discarded fixtures of municipal buildings from the 1930s and recast them, so that an old library card catalog is used to store old menus.

Top Dror (Wallpaper)

Published January 2008

Dror Benshetrit seems charmed.

He might seem charmed because he moved to New York five years ago and has already established himself as a leading force in the city's crowded design scene, or he might seem charmed because everything he designs is just such a hit. Benshetrit might seem charmed because he just seems to meet the right people – real estate magnate-to-the-hip Michael Shvo; ultra-influential MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli, an early supporter; the people who commission for Bombay, Boffi, Puma, Levi's  – or he might seem charmed because everything he does is at once so completely obvious and stunningly novel.

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.

On the Cusp (Metropolis)

Amale Andraos and Dan Wood—a pair of OMA alums—emerge from the long shadow of Rem Koolhaas.

Published July 25, 2007 (link)

“We’re in purgatory,” Amale Andraos says one morning earlier this year, her back to a row of desks covered in iPods, blue foam models, and gleaming black computers, their screens showing half-kicky renderings, half-straightforward CAD. She’s talking about Work Architecture Com­pany’s recent move to its new offices, but she might also be talking about where the firm stands now, about how after founding the office four and a half years ago she and partner Dan Wood are beginning to form their own identity.

Work is just wrapping up projects accepted as part of its first five-year plan, which they describe simply as “say yes to everything.” That explains the bathroom; the low-budget apartment renovation; the kitchen, where, Andraos says, “we almost got fired because we didn’t know how to do a kitchen”; and the Ultrasuede bordello-themed conference room. Now, with projects ranging from the New York headquarters for Diane von Furstenberg (DVF) to shops for the Anthropologie chain, the firm is finding its way out of the shadow—the “tattoo,” Andraos once called it—of Rem Koolhaas.