The Intuitive Two (Metropolis Magazine)
How do George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg please their high-profile clients? By discerning the difference between what they ask for and what they really need.
In 2001 Steve Hanson, the New York restaurateur, was not pleased when he heard that Yabu Pushelberg (YP) would be designing Bluefin, his 400-seat seafood restaurant at the base of the Times Square W Hotel. He had "inherited" them on the project from W's corporate parent, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, and, as he put it kindly, "I wasn't really sure of their capabilities." It was too late to get them fired (although he tried), but Hanson eventually came around. Fast-forward two years and several restaurants: Yabu Pushelberg is designing the third New York branch of Ruby Foos, Hanson's Asian-fusion mini-chain, on Union Square. "I think that everybody has a time and place," Hanson says, "and YP is really coming into their time and place."
During their twenty-year association George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg have secured their position as one of the leading interior-design firms in North America, especially in the glitzy arenas of retail and hospitality, by consistently producing designs that seem to distill the cultural moment into an essence that transcends trendiness. Undoubtedly their work is richly finished, astute and if not overwhelmingly original then perhaps the highest iteration of its type--a quality clients usually describe as "sophistication." And their clients should know: Yabu Pushelberg has made a habit of achieving stylistically uncompromising projects for famously demanding people, who in addition to Hanson include Four Seasons CEO Isadore Sharp, Starwood Hotels CEO Barry Sternlicht, nightclub impresario (and Cindy Crawford's husband) Rande Gerber, MGM Grand President Gamal Azziz, and fashion-industry institutions like Tiffany's, Bergdorf Goodman, and Carolina Herrera. Plenty of designers can design; few seem as adept as Yabu Pushelberg at doing it for clients with such well-developed ideas of their own image--and the teeth and ego to match. The firm's current project list bears this out. YP has commissions, in varying stages of completion, for nearly a dozen hotels: Four Seasons in Tokyo, Denver, and Hong Kong; a hotel for a major (but unnamed) chain in London; a Hard Rock Hotel in Chicago; and a Le Meridien in Minneapolis, among other.
It's a geographic range that keeps Yabu and Pushelberg constantly on the move, which in turn feeds their new projects. The day after I interviewed them in Toronto they were off to Mauritius, Berlin, and Mykonos. Throughout it all they seem unsurprised to find themselves at the center of the style nexus. They make no effort to operate theoretically, much less speculatively, on a plane beyond design as a vehicle for commerce. Instead, their skill is commerce. They design spaces that sell clothing, cosmetics, a hotel room, an image and, often, themselves. How they do it seems a potent combination of charisma, taste, and business acumen; they understand that what's best for their clients is best for them.
Yabu and Pushelberg share a calm intensity, a cool. On a Friday morning in midsummer both are informally dressed--Pushelberg in a black shirt with cowboy piping, Yabu in black Converse sneakers and a white T-shirt with cartoon figures running down the sleeve. Their conference room overlooks a narrow parking lot outside a low freestanding office building on an industrial street a few miles east of Toronto's crowded design district. It is an unusual location, but like many things about their practice, its remove is calculated, if in an off-hand way. On the other side of the glass, a BMW roadster is parked, in what could pass for a typical "YP" touch--a sort of top-shelf masculine glamour. It is also a small testament to their success.
Over the years the two have expanded their firm's workload with a finely grained division of labor. In the simplest terms, Pushelberg schmoozes and Yabu designs--but that characterization misses the point of their collaboration, which makes "distilling" the client's brief an integral part of the design process. Pushelberg is responsible for refining the project's "emotional program;" Yabu brings form to it, making it, as he says, "unique and different within the context of what it should be."
"Glenn's like the conduit between the client and myself and the team," Yabu explains."The
client gives you a program, but the program isn't always in the best interest of the project, or the best interest of what the client wants to achieve. Often designers or architects just design that programming completely intact. But when it goes to Glenn first, he's able to filter out all the bullshit, the stuff that doesn't really make sense, so we can concentrate on coming up with a solution that really fits the bill." Yabu turns towards Pushelberg to finish his thought. They often finish each other's sentences--although Pushleberg does most of the talking, leaving Yabu to be "kind of this silent but deadly person," as Pushelberg puts it.
"You've really got to form the client," Pushelberg says. "You've got to say, 'You've given me a brief, and the brief is missing key parts,' or 'The brief is missing the essence of what it should be, and this is what we think it should be and this is why.' It's important that they see that, because it adds value to what you're doing. They listen a lot more and trust you a lot more than just sort of judging it on a pretty solution or its uniqueness."
That morning, Pushelberg has just gotten off the redeye from Las Vegas, where he and Yabu had talked a major hotel chain into turning a $10 million project--renovating some rooms designed in the 1970s--into a $100 million reenvisioning of the hotel. "The project was to design a hotel room, but that wasn't going to give them what they really wanted--to attract a new customer to their casino," Pushelberg says. When the client asked them what they would do, the pair responded with a two-and-a-half hour presentation that reimagined the hotel with a new lobby, new restaurants, new bars, and unique retail. "The whole notion of these hotels is about the total experience," Pushelberg insists. When the hotel owner agreed, even YP was a bit surprised. "But once you illuminate and open the client's eyes, they're hooked," Yabu says. "They're like, 'Give me more!'"
Partly in an effort to keep up with that "more," YP has opened a New York office, in SoHo, as a beachhead on the city that, the principals admit, is their siren song. With only nine designers working there compared to 55 in Toronto, it's as much a corporate pied-a-terre as separate studio. The white walls, gray floors and clean lines make it feel quiet and serene, like a stage set for heaven. It wouldn't be a shock to learn there's extra oxygen pumping through the air-conditioning. The result is a sort of seduction chamber for clients; Yabu and Pushelberg claim that they almost always get the job when potential clients come to this office--and the client often insists that subsequent meetings be held there. "The more we get them over here the happier they are, the easier the project will go, the more we're in control," George Wong, the ranking designer in New York, says.
The New York studio's opening in 2002 was carefully calculated to draw the sort of blue-chip clients Yabu and Pushelberg covet far more than straight growth. As Chris Koroknay, their studio manager, explains, they have effectively priced themselves out of Canada--"Like Porsche and Mercedes, when you walk into the showroom you know what you're going to need to spend"--and New York is home to the clients they're after.
"But we don't want to be any bigger," Pushelberg says.
"Uh-uh," adds Yabu. "You sort of ratchet up, and you house clean. You just clean out--"
"--clients you don't need anymore."
"You improve the quality of the clients, and you tend to go for more challenges rather than final dollar. Or you go for people who are nice to work with. It's as simple as that."
"Who get it."
"Yeah. The who-get-it factor. Because once they get it, it's a lot more enjoyable." No other designers seem to have as much fun cultivating their snob appeal. It's not ungratefulness on their part, just impatience and an insistent drive towards new challenges. Their clients often call it "charisma" (a natural corollary to "sophistication") and it convinces the client they know what's right, for both the design and--crucially--the design's impact on their business. As Hanson said, "I work so closely with them, it's a pretty hard line to find out where that medium point is about who's pushing what. But they're pushers--and they do understand the customer."
What results is a desire for challenges that go beyond the aesthetic--and they're willing to travel far to find them. "If it takes a lot of time to go all the way there and back, you think, 'Well should I really do that?'" Pushelberg says, "but on the other hand, if there's a challenge there that makes it interesting and worthwhile doing, more than another"--he checks himself, then draws out the name for effect--"duh-bell-you hotel, it's much more interesting."
This in a way explains why Yabu Pushelberg has recently completed the restaurant, bar, and public spaces for a new Le Meridien hotel in Minneapolis. Located across the street from the Target Center, home of the Minnesota Timerberwolves, the hotel explicitly seeks to outclass its local competitors--even if that's a challenge Yabu Pushelberg seem a bit sheepish about taking up. (As Pushelberg points out, "You're not going to be Ian Schrager in Minneapolis. It doesn't make any sense.") But the hotel's developers, the father-son team of Graves Hospitality, have a sort of spare-no-expense braggadocio whose appeal to a designer seems obvious--if it's handled responsibly. "We want to be the kingpin in town," the son and vice-president, Ben Graves, explains before launching into the details of the special water piping the hotel installed, at enormous cost, to feed the rooms' multi-head showers. He and his father "wanted to take it to a little bit less trendy and a little bit more sophisticated look" than the typical boutique hotel, he says.
Yabu Pushelberg responded with a design carefully pitched for glitz without gimmick--in response both to the demands of the local market and the design challenge it posed for them. "There's a crispness to the aesthetic that really responds to that community in a subtle way," Yabu says. A series of intimate spaces shift the atmosphere from the street to the upstairs lobby, with textured walls and commissioned art--including a piece by the Japanese artist Hirotoshi Sawada, who also did the "wave wall" at Blue Fin. The formula is working. "We're the hotspot," Graves says, "the sizzle for the marketplace. It's amazing, we have all the celebrities and all the beautiful people hanging out." Then he starts talking about future projects Graves Hospitality is discussing with Yabu Pushelberg.
