10 Questions With… Michael Hsu

ID: When was the first time you encountered the design of a space or an object?

MH: My family is Chinese, and left China for Taiwan, which is where I was born—and then we all immigrated to Houston when I was three. My grandfather was an architect, my mother was a painter, and my father was a sort of captain of cargo ships. Not the usual architect background! But they were highly creative. It was a family where things were just being made all the time; there was always activity. And when I was really young, I was making models of things and dissembling equipment, which led to a love of drawing. I went to college for engineering, then moved to the School of Art at the University of Texas for about a year, before finally settling into the middle with architecture. Growing up in a house where aesthetics were important made me have a real curiosity on the effects of space on people, and how they can change a person’s life.

ID: How did you get from there to OMA?

MH: I had some early internships where the work was not exciting. It’s always important to have bad jobs so you have a better idea of what you absolutely don’t want to do. Then, I took a residency position at OMA and it was a real awakening. I’ve never worked as hard as I did at that time. The goal wasn’t always to complete a project—the process was important as was the investigation. There was a sensibility of embracing quirkiness and questioning the normal rules of design. And I brought that back and went to work in Austin. At the time, it was not a strong market. The early work I did was adaptive reuse and interiors. That was a turning point, too, thinking about architecture as experiential. That was one of the core tenants of the formation of this office.

ID: How so?

MH: The food scene was just starting in Austin, and the restaurants weren’t necessarily strongly-designed environments. They were a combination of sensory experiences, food and smells and how the place feels. Hospitality informs a lot of how I see design. I love that you only spend a short amount of time in a place—so you can incorporate novelty—but you never want a place to be so temporal that it fades quickly. It’s threading that needle. We start with materials, and then light, color, texture, and pattern. We try not to talk about style, necessarily. We try to delay the actual design of a place until we know what the spirit of the place wants to be, so it has a real point of view. Once we formalize that, then the design follows.

ID: How does that process express itself in a project like The Terminal at Katy Trail?

MH: That was our first significant project in Dallas, and it’s where we relied on the value we put in materiality and scale. It’s a compact, mixed-use project, almost like a little city unto itself on a busy trailway that’s used by tons of Dallasites. It’s filled with high-end condominiums that feel like standalone residences, and we incorporated a wide variety of restaurants, retail, and health and wellness spaces. Everything is walkable, which is tough to find in Texas. We went with a Roman brick that had a wash on the face of it—with an organic quality—a residential style brick, and used plaster and windows with a warm metal finish, instead of curtain walls. We wanted to make the statement that this residential scale of a building could be really appealing. There are lots of indoor/outdoor spaces. And for the building steps: it’s not a box, it sort of moves in and out as you go around the façade, to break it up in a way that captures light and shadow and feels unique. Every unit has a different view and design. We made a custom pattern terrazzo, and installed herringbone oak floors, slab marble surfaces, and divided light windows. It’s a very unusual product for this area.

ID: You also designed a restaurant, Le PasSage, for The Terminal at Katy Trail—how does that fit into the scheme?

MH: It’s essentially three restaurants: Rose Café, which is a casual all-day French cuisine, and there’s the Le PasSage itself, which is Asian-inspired. The owners are French, the chef is French, and their sensibilities translated into something romantic. It was about creating intimacy, making sure that no matter how large the room, every seat felt extraordinary. The third part is a tiny bar that only fits 12 people or so. I love surprise spaces that almost feel too tight because it builds a coziness and humanness into projects. I don’t enjoy hospitality in over-scaled rooms, and that may just be a neurological sort of perspective—we have a nature to try and find a level of energy and security in any space. So there’s a kind of tuning towards a humane sort of experience that feels more special.

ID: You’d done quite a bit of work in Austin before the Dallas projects—how do those markets differ?

MH: Austin frames its luxury in casualness. In many ways, it means: how quickly can this space get me to feel comfortable? I think it’s still in its adolescence, still trying new things on, but even the fanciest restaurants in Austin are still very casual. My wife is from Dallas, so I knew it pretty well, and there, the level of refinement matters. It’s more on the traditional side, but that was a fun exploration of looking at molding, wood details, what we can do with brass and drapery. There wasn’t a desire to transplant what we do in Austin to Dallas. Contextualism is important and in hospitality, it’s a requirement. The places we are tempted to go have to have a point of view. That’s something every brand should strive for, now.

ID: Can that point of view be translatable?

MH: 100%! What we called traditional design has a lot to be learned from it. The contrast between traditional homes with modern furniture—as a foil, for instance—is so rich. It carries connotations of time and changes of style. We’re designing a hotel in San Antonio right now that is a bit more South American-modern, seen through a Texas lens with Latin influences. We’re exploring and embracing traditional detailing because they provide richness and scale. They give something for your eye to land on and, at some level, really do provide a lot of comfort.

ID: Did that approach your design for Sway, the Thai restaurant in Aspen?

MH: That project was meant to provide a cuisine that’s not exactly a regional food in a luxurious mountain town. It was a small space that didn’t have a lot of windows, and I loved it because of the scale. We put a quite low ceiling in it. We tried to minimize the use of sheet rock, and covered every surface with a material that had texture without a lot of processing. The ceiling is a woven textile for soundproofing, imported from South Asia. We used woven cane, different species of wood, plaster, and some custom brass fixtures. The booths were sort of Shaker. You could say it looks very much like you’re in a mountain town, in Colorado or Switzerland. If I didn’t tell you it’s a Thai restaurant, you could think it was something else—but as a Thai restaurant, it also suits its mission.

ID: What’s next on the boards for you?

MH: We’re working on more mixed-use districts, with hospitality and retail and living spaces, along with boutique offices. There’s such a lack of what I would call cohesive neighborhoods in Texas that I think developers with the longer-term perspective really see the value in that. When we choose to vacation or spend time someplace with family and friends, whether it’s Mexico City or Montreal or New York or Kyoto, those places are so human and tap into some sort of DNA. Real estate now has to compete with all the technology that we have; architecture, design, and interiors are competing with the virtual world. And so, we like to design places that embrace humanness. We try to use all the tools we have to create places that make people feel good.