10 Questions With… George Yabu And Glenn Pushelberg

Yabu Pushelberg Redefines The Rules Of Hospitality

Interior Design: Let’s start with how you met and started a professional and romantic partnership.

Yabu Pushelberg: We met as 18-year-old interior design students at Ryerson University in Toronto. We were part of a group of friends from school, both working out of our homes and doing little projects. We ran into each other on the streets two years after graduation and talked about sharing a little studio together. At our shared studio, we helped each other with projects to meet the deadlines, and, soon, we realized our work synergies matched. Eventually, we decided to turn this into a business together. We started very humbly with the design of a coffee shop. We had very little but also a lot of fun and passion, which has a lot to do with our longevity.

We became lovers throughout the process. Within the first decade of working together, we started to make some money, although we almost went bankrupt once. Our goal has never been about becoming business people. We are still driven by the desire to have fun and remain risk-takers who push ourselves to do to work in typologies that we have never worked in. We go to places we haven’t worked on, because we’re still curious. Our life is not is not about getting bigger, but about getting better.

ID: How do you distribute tasks between the two of you? 

YP: Distribution is hybrid now. When we first started, we would make a drawing that one of us would start and the other would take over. There were periods when we were on top of each other, doing all the things, which was fun at the beginning. Though, you could also go crazy if you live and work with the same person. As our studio grew, we needed to divide and conquer, but also come together in the end. Today, one of us might start a concept and the other takes over, or one can handle an entire project himself. One of us sometimes gets into the nitty gritty of a project and makes it special. Our rules go back-and-forth and change.

On the other hand, our ethos has never changed from day one, which is why we’re comfortable to be nimble and alter how to approach the right design. There are so many ways of coming up with ideas, and we’re very comfortable breaking them apart and come up with a solution comfortably, without fear.

We once took summer design management courses at Harvard, including marketing and business. One of the things they said was to pick a typology, like if we’re going to design hospitals, then we should design hospitals, or if we want to design offices, then we should stick to it. We ended up doing totally the opposite thing, and we still do so. We take it to a different more difficult road from a business perspective, but from a creative perspective, this is much more interesting.

ID: You both focus on interiors, but you have also recently expanded to product design. How did this growth happen? 

YP: We started hiring industrial designers to create products, because we want to make our interiors better. They’re trained differently than interior people. Then the same goes for textile, so we hired textile designers. We train and mentor people, regardless of what their design school is.

There is a 10-year gap between our two collaborations with Molteni, and the reason was we didn’t have the team yet to make the table that we would feel comfortable with. We waited to have the confidence in doing an object that would pop out. This also meant we had built a form of trust with them.

The way industrial product designers are trained is about seeking a creative problem to solve. Is it about the cantilever of the chair? Is there a metaphor? Are forms working together? What is the negative and positive of the chair? A lot of people come to us for residential interiors, and we turn them down because the project is too easy.

It is interesting to watch different team members. We’re all looking at a chair, let’s say, but with a different angle. Industrial designers spin it around in different angles, upside down, sideways, rotating and flipping over, or bird’s eye view. They design the object, but the rest is in space, which is the benefit that we have. Interior designers can put that object, whether it’s a chair or a table, and give it a purpose, reason and stories.

ID: When we look at your Aman residency project in Tokyo or the bar you designed for Moët & Chandon in Berlin, we always see a bold statement. Sexy texture meet interesting scales and color choices. How do you familiarize yourself with a project in terms of its city? 

YP: We try to get an understanding of a place, and if nobody gives us any information, we build a story, a narrative. In the case of Berlin, we talked about what champagne connotes, not a day-to-day drink for the most part. There are associations of effervescence and decadence. Each detail has an intention, the intense red little alcove, the little peekaboos on the wall, and the champagne colored metal front of the bar.

ID: La Samaritaine department store in Paris occupies a historical building. What were the different elements of embarking on a renovation project, which means heritage and history, as opposed to a clean slate?

YP: The nice thing about that project is that it had amazing natural bones, such as the iconic staircase. The big atrium is always the focus. The visitors are in a natural ring with each floor, but the space is also very intimate. There is no suffocation because of all this natural light. The challenge was this balance of rejuvenating the old lady and and creating a sense of modernity at the same time, all working in a synergy together.

The board found out that all the steel should be painted in a horrible egg yolk yellow. We convinced them to chip off the existing paint to see what color is underneath and found this amazing gray blue. We also convinced the board that this color can be considered historic because it was underneath the existing paint. We eventually would use this blue, which is much more compatible to the murals and the ceilings.

ID: How do you create a communal, inviting feeling and a sense of seductive privacy in your hospitality projects?

YP: Whatever the typology of a space is, we try to use the interior to help somebody have an emotion. Someone could feel centered, energized, or serene. They might just want to sit in a corner and watch people. Most go through the manipulation of the three dimensional space, with how we use lighting, how certain colors pull people, or how a corner is formed. There must be this great sense of discovery.

But for Aman, their ethos is to make guests feel that they are the only person at a resort. And, in order to achieve this physically, there needs to be a specific layout of the public spaces and the paths. For the Aman residences in Tokyo, for example, we created short cuts for those who don’t want to run into their neighbors. In terms of creating hospitable spaces, we, as designers, have to take care of so many different people coming into a specific brand—there might be a person who is coming to a bar to get lucky or someone who might want to go over tomorrow’s presentation in their head. It is not a one-size-fits-all approach that can cater to all customer profiles.

ID: Could you talk about the art consulting aspect of your brand?

YP: We’ve found that the art often doesn’t connect with the story that we, as designers, create for the hotel guests. There is usually no alignment. Art supports what we try to say in a project. The same can also be said for the flowers, the equipments, or the cutlery. And the wrong art can really destroy or diminish the story and give a wrong message. The advising component came out of wanting to make our work stronger and more cohesive. We often have in mind the type of artist that a project needs.

In our early days, we did some installation art and we have friends and employees who are artists. We have an ongoing relationship with an art advisory firm called Hanabi, which is run by our friend Jamie. We are, in a way, one step removed from selecting the art, but we coach him about what we need. Art in a space needs to speak for itself. If the environment is too tight with too much interior around, it won’t play well.

ID: You are a fan of Peter Hujar’s photography. He heavily used furniture pieces such as chairs in connection with the human form. What do you think about the relation between corporality, the body, and furniture when you design an object or an interior?

YP: The Hujar work that we have is purely corporal, and there are no props or objects in it. It almost looks like a non-figurative Henry Moore sculpture even though the subject is the human body.

But of course in Hujar’s overall work, there is reference to history, as well as a political statement. We have a program with the Art Gallery of Ontario, in which we work with their curator of photography and we donate gay, lesbian, and transgender photography to the museum. We’ve donated Peter Hujar, Tseng Kwong Chi, Wolfgang Tillmans, and others. We want to be able to teach younger queer generations their immediate history, from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s and it is important to do this through art, which is a great vehicle.

ID: You have a scholarship program with Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU). What kind of investment do you see in supporting newcomers?

YP: We established an excellence-based scholarship in which the recipient gets some money and they have an opportunity to work with us. We also have another center scholarship because we want to push design innovation. Beyond raising money, we’re on the board of TMU as an outside council. We’re also starting new activities where we host salon-style gatherings at our offices in New York and Toronto with guest speakers who educate university students about different topics. We talk about topics related to future, such as longevity and ways to collaborate with different businesses. We try to build bridges with schools and help shape the curriculum a bit.

ID: Hotel projects give designers a freedom that they may not have with domestic interiors. We tend to be more open to experimental hotel rooms but choose a muted setting for a permanent bedroom.

YP: Yes, the guests still must have the feeling that they are in control and know where everything is. Most hotels want guests to feel at home. But we tell them “you know what, sometimes they just don’t want to feel like they’re at home.” This is more about feeling in control, but, yes, not necessarily at home.