The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Ace Hotel New York. The Chicago Athletic Association. The NoMad hotel in London. Goop’s store in Los Angeles. The Reykjavik Edition hotel, in Iceland. The Boom Boom Room.
These are all some of the places where people can step into the world of interiors created by Roman and Williams, an architectural and interior design firm started 20 years ago this month. As that world has grown to include locations in seven countries and three continents, Robin Standefer, 58, and Stephen Alesch, 57, the company’s married founders, have often returned to Montauk, New York, where they have lived part time since 2006.
“I think this room has been the centre of our lives and our creativity for the better part of the past 20 years,” Standefer said inside a studio at their Long Island home, on a Sunday afternoon in October.
In the studio — a renovated garage — there were sheepskin throws covering a wood-frame couch by Brazilian designer and architect Sergio Rodrigues; bushels of dried hydrangeas bursting from antique battery jars collected by Standefer; and paintings of seascapes, bought on eBay and embellished by Alesch, lining a wall. On another wall hung the bust of a stuffed goat, a gift to the couple. Its glassy eyes seemed to be gazing down at a group of conch shells Standefer had arranged concentrically on a low wood table that she and Alesch had designed.
“Their rooms are like portals into another place and time,” said Johannes Knoops, a professor in the interior design department at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the chair of the college’s Lawrence Israel Prize committee. The prize, which recognises exemplary interior design, was awarded to Roman and Williams in 2013.
Interiors designed by Standefer and Alesch typically incorporate antiques and vintage pieces meant to be used, not kept out of reach on a shelf. Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, the curator of contemporary design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, said, “Roman and Williams have figured out the formula for making antiques physically and intellectually cozy — which, by today’s standards, they most often are not.”
Their process includes researching historical materials and traditional forms of craftsmanship: bricklaying, say, or the intricate lost-wax method of casting bronze into decorative objects. They often experiment with such techniques themselves and then work with artisans to apply the methods in their projects, whether pieces of furniture or buildings the firm designs.
“There’s no need to reinvent everything all the time,” Alesch told GQ in 2009, the same year he and Standefer completed interiors at the Ace Hotel New York, where they filled the lobby with vintage British campaign chairs, tartan-covered armchairs, an enormous American flag and a case of stuffed birds, all lit warmly with filament bulbs. Interior Design magazine honoured the Ace in New York as the boutique hotel of the year in 2009, and Wallpaper magazine’s 2010 Design Awards recognised it as one of the five best new hotels.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Roman and Williams Buildings and Interiors, as the firm is formally known, was named for the founders’ maternal grandfathers, William Winters (hers) and Roman Alesch (his). Standefer and Alesch started it in the living room of their East Fourth Street loft in Manhattan in November 2002. They first met a decade earlier, in Los Angeles, while working in the art department of the film “The New Age.” Together, they refashioned a storefront on Robertson Boulevard into a fictitious clothing boutique featured in the movie.
Alesch, who was born in Nina, Wisconsin, grew up in Malibou Lake, a residential community developed by director Cecil B. DeMille in Agoura Hills, California. He studied philosophy and engineering at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and apprenticed at architectural firms in Los Angeles before getting into movies. As a set designer, he began each project with a hand drawing, a method he has continued to use at Roman and Williams.
Standefer, who was born in the Bronx and raised in Manhattan, New York, studied art and architecture at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, before graduating from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She then worked as a curator and, in the late 1980s, as a visual consultant on the film “New York Stories.” In that job, she met Martin Scorsese, who later hired her as a creative consultant on his films “Goodfellas” and “The Age of Innocence.”
They bought the loft where they would eventually start Roman and Williams in 1997. By then a couple, they would spend time in New York between production design jobs in Hollywood, where they had developed a reputation for craftsmanship, attention to detail and fashioning sets with a lived-in quality.
“People said that their homes looked fake, and the sets they were on felt real,” Alesch said. Standefer added, “The stars and producers on these movie sets said, ‘Why don’t our houses look as good as the movie sets?’ And we were like, ‘They can.’”
Their first high-profile client was actor Ben Stiller, whom Standefer and Alesch had become friendly with while working on the sets of “Zoolander” and “Duplex.” Stiller hired them in 2002 to redesign his 1920s Spanish-style home in Los Angeles, where they had walls repainted in aquamarine blue, aubergine velvet sofas installed and dark wood bookcases built to match exposed-wood ceiling beams. In 2003, they opened the first Roman and Williams office on the Paramount Pictures lot in Hollywood.
Their transformation of Stiller’s home stood out to one visitor in particular. “I walked into Ben’s house, and I was like, ‘Who did your house?’” actor Kate Hudson said. She had recently bought her childhood home in the Pacific Palisades section of Los Angeles, which was built in the 1930s.
While working on Hudson’s home, the duo decided to move to New York. They closed their office on the Paramount lot and in 2004 opened their current office on Lafayette Street in SoHo (which they said would soon move to a different location in the neighbourhood). A year later, in 2005, Standefer and Alesch were married.
Taking Off in New York
Not long after their pivot to private residences, Standefer and Alesch took on a more public-facing project: reimagining the lobby of the Royalton hotel in midtown Manhattan, which at the time featured interiors designed by Philippe Starck. The lobby became a place to see and be seen after Starck redesigned it in 1988 but over the years had lost its buzz.
Their Royalton lobby, which featured dark wood panelling, brown leather couches and steel coffee tables, debuted in 2007 to mixed reviews. “The old lobby was the must-see interior of its time, and the new one isn’t,” critic Alice Rawsthorn wrote in The New York Times.
But by then, Roman and Williams had already been hired for other hotel projects. Developer André Balazs, after meeting Standefer and Alesch in 2004, commissioned the company to design all the interiors at his first Standard hotel in New York: the Standard, High Line.
Although Roman and Williams had done a hotel lobby, the Standard project was on a different scale. The company at the time had six employees, including its two founders. When told that developers had to visit the office to ensure the firm could do the job, Standefer recalled thinking, “We need more people.” She added, “So we bring in friends, like, to sit in the office, walking through the office.”
A few months after Balazs hired the firm to do the 338-room Standard hotel, Alex Calderwood, a co-founder of the Ace Hotel chain, commissioned it to design interiors at the Ace Hotel New York, a 258-room property inside a 1904 building in the NoMad neighbourhood of Manhattan.
The 2009 debut of both hotels — the Standard that March and the Ace that May — helped establish Roman and Williams as a design firm with range. The Boom Boom Room club atop the Standard — with its curvy banquettes, glossy golden bar and panoramic view of a shimmering city at night — conveyed 24-karat glamour. The rooms at the Ace, decorated with Gibson guitars and vinyl LPs, evoked hipster sophistication.
Business took off from there. Over the next decade, as Roman and Williams worked on private residences, it took on dozens of public-facing projects: the Manhattan restaurants the Dutch, Lafayette and Le Coucou, as well as restaurants in Paris, Milan and Istanbul; Freehand hotels in New York, Chicago and Miami; a dining hall at Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. (Standefer and Alesch never worked directly with Mark Zuckerberg, but they said he was “invoked often.”)
Designs for the Future
“Roman and Williams to us was always more an idea than a design practice, and a design practice didn’t satisfy the whole appetite,” Standefer said at La Mercerie on a Thursday morning in October.
She and Alesch have not lost their taste for the interior design work they built their business upon, but after two decades, they have become more selective. “We’re grateful to now be at a level where we can pick and choose our projects,” Standefer said in an email, noting that in 2021, the year the company completed the NoMad London hotel, it also designed a birdhouse at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. “We like that and are interested in that mix.” They just released the OVO collection, a new line of made-to-order furniture sold at the Guild. Soon to come are the Seed and Branch series, which will include a bronze candelabrum and other décor made using the lost-wax casting process, and the Dado collection, which will include a desk and other furniture inspired in part by Donald Judd’s designs.
Other in-the-works projects include a residence and artists’ retreat in Montauk for gallerist David Zwirner and a hotel in Amsterdam. There are hopes to introduce more Guild locations. Alesch dreams of designing a high school. “You’re constantly looking for what’s missing,” he said. — NYT
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