Architecture August 30, 2006, 11:18AM EST

Prime Time

Having just completed a Midtown steakhouse, New York downtown darlings AvroKO are set to reach a wider audience

Story Tools

Slide Show >>

“Our clients like the idea that we can work in so many different disciplines,” says Adam Farmerie, a partner in New York design firm AvroKO. He’s giving a tour of his firm’s just finished project, Quality Meats. For the amber-lit Manhattan steakhouse, a property of the Smith & Wollensky Restaurant Group, AvroKO designed not only the space but also details like tables, lighting, waitstaff uniforms, and water-bottle graphics. Since joining forces six years ago, the quartet—architects Farmerie and Greg Bradshaw and graphic designers William Harris and Kristina O’Neal—has carved out a niche in Lower Manhattan as a one-stop shop for soup-to-nuts restaurant design.

The creative force behind such downtown hot spots as Sapa, the Stanton Social, and Public, they often draw design inspiration from their Nolita locale; their offices, above Public, are just north of New York’s Little Italy. A streak of gritty nostalgia runs through much of their work. Channeling a vanished New York, they frequently unearth a building’s original substructure, finding beauty in the construction history buried beneath layers (and years) of drywall and paint. In a milieu—New York restaurant design—dominated by the sort of big-ticket theatricality pioneered by David Rockwell and Adam Tihany, the firm stands out for its focus on intimate, even bleak, spaces and its frequent use of found repurposed materials. The terribly photogenic foursome—the subject of a good deal of media attention and the upcoming book Best Ugly—is in constant demand these days, with ongoing projects in Toronto, Santa Fe, and Las Vegas.

Smith & Wollensky Restaurant Group CEO Alan Stillman, a 40-year veteran of the business with 16 eateries nationwide, had been toying with ideas for updating his brand when his son, Michael, lured him downtown to Public last year. “I said to my dad, ‘You’ve got to come check this place out,’” the 26-year-old former art-history major says, recalling his infatuation with AvroKO’s unique aesthetic. As impressed as his son, Stillman senior arranged to have lunch with Harris and Farmerie. A few months later they were in business together.

In a significant departure from the work they’d been doing, AvroKO signed on to conceptualize an entire restaurant chain, agreeing to export to suburbia their trademark dark urban shadows and raw industrial surfaces. But just as they were starting to map out the first three of these stand-alone Wollensky’s Grills, Stillman offered a detour—a sort of test run, working under his son’s supervision to transform the Manhattan Ocean Club, a dated seafood restaurant on West 58th Street, into a modern steakhouse. Despite having recently hired the talented young chef Craig Koketsu, who’d worked at the four-star Lespinasse, the restaurant wasn’t bringing in the traffic they’d hoped.

“We had this new chef, fabulous, we loved his food,” Michael Stillman says. “But it was very hard to get people into a 20-year-old restaurant. We brought AvroKO in to see what they thought of the place. It was the middle of December. We said, ‘We want to close in January and open [as a new restaurant] in April. We haven’t even approached the chef yet. What do you guys think?’ They came back and said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

For its first completed project beyond the boundaries of downtown New York, AvroKO drew on the history of the space and of the client. The oversize Quality Meats sign that adorns the front barroom today has long been a part of the Smith & Wollensky corporate identity.