June 12, 2017Workshop/APD founders Andrew Kotchen, left, and Matthew Berman met in college and launched their firm in 1999. Today, they have a staff of 44 and are working on a range of residential and commercial projects (portrait by Gordon Convery). Top: This Nantucket living room features a custom coffee table and side table, both of which were designed by Workshop/APD (photo by Donna Dotan).
The textile industry has long employed the word hand in describing what a material feels like. Charmeuse, for instance, might have a “soft, supple hand,” while linen might possess a “crisp hand” and worsted wool a “nubby hand.”
Matthew Berman and Andrew Kotchen, founders of Manhattan-based Workshop/APD (short for architecture, planning and design), don’t feel the necessity of restricting this concept to fabric. In their minds, anything, whether machine made or created by artisans, can have a hand. Wood might have a smoothly planed hand. A polished and waxed granite countertop could possess a leathery hand. Even the way particular furnishings are brought together in a room can be described using this all-encompassing term. “We try to strike a balance between store-bought, vintage and custom pieces,” says Berman. “That’s the thing that gives a space hand.”
Color, too. “How do we take color and explore it through the lens of the hand?” asks Kotchen. “We don’t use color for color’s sake. It’s not just application. It’s an extension of the hard materials.”
The point — essentially a modernist one, of course — is that every choice an architect or designer makes must have a specific and thoroughly examined purpose. Buildings as well as environments should telegraph a singular feeling (hand), and that can only be achieved through conceptual rigor, in which every element is harnessed in the service of the desired message. “Any lifestyle that’s edited,” says Berman, “is going to feel better than a lifestyle that’s cluttered.”
In this Waccabuc, New York, dining room, a Designheure chandelier hangs over Workshop/APD’s custom-designed live-edge table and chairs. Photo by Donna Dotan
Further, the firm’s work is predicated on finding a unique equilibrium between machined and handcrafted aesthetics. The homes, restaurants and commercial projects it designs mix natural materials such as wood, travertine and lush fabrics with industrial lighting, cantilevered steel stairways, glass and highly lacquered surfaces. It is a look and feel they have dubbed “crafted modern.”
As you may have guessed, these are men, both 44 years old, accustomed to thinking, theorizing and ideating. In fact, when you meet with them, you sense a kind of crackling, feverish intellectual energy. Berman is quieter, sporting a neatly trimmed beard, thick, closely cropped hair and eyes that seem to smile even when he is serious. Kotchen has curly, wiry locks, soft features and blue eyes. But in the words of one satisfied client for whom he designed a Nantucket house, he “can be intense,” even when conducting the initial interview in casual shorts and flip-flops.
The concentration and intensity are balanced by a jocular rapport acquired over years of friendship. This combination of thorough thought processes and amiability has attracted clients who range across residential, hospitality and commercial categories as well as in age and background. Kotchen allows, however, that “a certain level of sophistication is ideal. We don’t tend to get project virgins.
The partners’ current roster is impressive. On their docket are 30 or 35 single, multifamily and commercial projects, including a restaurant and hotel lobby in Chicago and an entire hotel in Salt Lake City; a residential development in Pittsburgh; five townhouses in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and one in Brooklyn; an apartment in Miami; and houses in Nantucket, the Bahamas, the Florida town of Stuart and Crested Butte, Colorado. In 18 years, the firm has grown from just the two of them to a staff of 44 architects, interior designers, urban planners and administrative staff. In addition to working on several possible licensing deals, in May it released a furniture line produced in collaboration with Desiron.
Two Jean de Merry stools sit in front of the fireplace in this Aspen, Colorado, living room. The table is by Boca do Lobo. Photo by David O. Marlow
The two Connecticut-born principals met at Lehigh University, where they studied architecture, the career, they each assert, they knew from childhood they would pursue. After earning their bachelor’s degrees in 1994, they worked on their master’s degrees at different schools — Berman at Columbia University, in New York; Kotchen at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor — while remaining in close contact.
After graduating, each pursued work separately for a brief period, Berman mainly as an architecture and design journalist and Kotchen first as a junior architect at Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn Architects and later designing homes on his own in Nantucket and New York. But, recalls Kotchen, “ultimately Matt and I decided to work together. We figured it would be much more fun to sit next to each other than sit alone.” That was in 1999. In 2004, Metropolitan Home featured one of their projects, a renovated Manhattan apartment on the Upper West Side, as “home of the month.” But their big break came in 2006, when they won the Sustainable Design Competition for New Orleans, which was sponsored by Brad Pitt and Global Green in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The award launched them on a speaking circuit and garnered them copious press. The partners have been extremely effective at leveraging every opportunity that has come their way. “At some point,” says Kotchen, “the confidence level exhibited in your portfolio flips, and people come to you to do what you do.”
And that they have. As the company continues to grow, says Kotchen, “our commitment remains the same: delivering a holistic design experience. What keeps the engine of the office running is a passion for good work and for always improving, pushing our philosophy to the limit and making things better.”
Matthew Berman and Andrew Kotchen’s Quick Picks on 1stdibs
