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I t’s 5 o’clock on a pleasant fall day, and I am sharing a bottle of wine with the four principle designers of AvroKO—Kristina O’Neal, Adam Farmerie, William Harris and Greg Bradshaw—at their recently opened Noho restaurant, Saxon + Parole.

Mr. Harris is excitedly trying to explain their firm’s design philosophy.

“When Kristina and I were in China, we were given a tour of an artist compound where there was this amazing manicured garden,” he begins, glancing around the table at his partners for nods of confirmation. “The guide was taking us through it, pointing out all sorts of beautiful plants and arrangements, and then at the end there was this really gnarled, beguiling, twisted tree that was so out of place and di!erent from the rest of the garden. So we asked our guide what it was doing there, and in his broken Eng-lish he said, ‘Well, that is here because it is best ugly. It was there because it was an interrupt to all these beautiful things around it. It made the space better. It was sublimely imperfect. It was gorgeous because it wasn’t so self-consciously manicured.”

The AvroKO team has taken this “best ugly” philosophy and run with it, creating a global design business with projects including the W Hotel in Bangkok, Kid Robot’s Los Angeles and New York stores, and, of course, restaurants, which the four friends and former classmates at Carnegie Mellon professionally first collabo-rated on 10 years ago. Mr. Bradshaw and Mr. Farmerie had just started an architecture group called Avro Design, and Ms. O’Neal and Mr. Harris were growing their own media brand-ing and concept shop, Ko Media. Together, they opened eatery Public with Mr. Farmerie’s brother Brad as chef. Inspired by the depres-sion era of public works projects—think oak

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library cataloges and shiny o"ce boxes—the Nolita restaurant swept the 2004 James Beard Foundation Awards, taking home the prizes for “Outstanding Design” and “Outstanding Graphic,” an unprecedented achievement.

“They were the cool new kids on the block,”

recalls Cindy Allen, editor in chief of Interior Design magazine. “They had this industrial, yet sleek, organic style. They were one of the early design firms to create what was then becoming a trendy style.”

As Mr. Harris puts it, “Public was the

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INSIDE NEW YORK DESIGN FIRM AVROKO’S RISE TO THE TOP

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launching pad.” Clients began lining up outside AvroKO’s door looking to work with the restau-rant industry’s rising design stars. Since Public, the team has received countless accolades for the spaces they’ve created together and, while they’ve branched out to hotels and retail work, restaurants remain their true passion.

“We’re history nerds,” admits Mr. Harris. “We love to read about and research times when spaces were less design-conscious and it was more purely a matter of function. Func-tionality, utility, practicality—those are really strong tenets in our approach to design and you

can find them in all our projects.” The folded horse blankets at Saxon + Parole, for example, serve to dampen sound between two of the dining rooms. At Public, repurposed post o!ce boxes double as wine lockers in which loyal patrons can stash a bottle or two.

The foursome believe one of the keys to their success is a holistic approach toward design. With two architects in Mr. Farmerie and Mr. Bradshaw and two graphic artists in Mr. Harris and Ms. O’Neal, the group is able to tackle every aesthetic aspect of a project, from the big-picture structural design of the space down to

the minutiae like the labels on the house wine. When they first started, this one-stop-shop approach was rare in the world of design.

“We all realized very early on that we didn’t necessarily have to play by the rules,” explains Mr. Farmerie. “Architects didn’t just have to do architecture, and people who are supposed to be doing branding didn’t have to only do that. And, once we realized we could swap across these di"erent mediums, we found that we could also swap across di"erent types of work. A design firm didn’t just have to do work for clients. We could also open a restaurant ourselves. It was like taking the shackles o"." An architecture and design firm owning and operating its projects—the technical term for such a project is “self-propelled”—remains uncommon in the hospitality design industry, and some were skeptical.

“There was a little bit of , ‘Oh, so you think you can do all these things and do them well, do you?’” recalls Ms. O’Neal. “We definitely had to prove ourselves. But, overall, I think people maybe enjoyed or admired our chutzpah, our willingness to do whatever we wanted to do.”

Interior Design was one such admirer. “That’s courageous risk-taking at its best, especially in the times we’ve had,” she says. “That’s not wait-ing around for the phone to ring, and everyone can respect that.”

Another venture that paid o" was AvroKO’s early exploration of the Asian market. Initially, the driving motivation was a fierce interest, especially on the part of Mr. Harris, in the cultural and artistic opportunities that Asia o"ered designers.

“We love the amazing access to artisans, the amazing access to woodcraft and pottery,” he says, his eyes lighting up. “All the stu" that everyone ships back to the States and marks up a gazillion times is right in your back yard. There’s actually a better source for antique American liquor bottles in a Bangkok street market than you can find here!”

While it may have been purely an artistic venture at first, expanding eastward proved to be a fortuitous business move for AvroKO as well, and they’ve since opened an o!ce in Hong Kong and a studio in Bangkok. With demand slowing significantly in the past couple of years at home, and the economies of China and other Asian countries exploding, almost all major design and hospitality groups have moved a significant portion of their business east. According to Interior Design, which publishes a ranked list of the biggest “Hospitality Giants” (on which AvroKO holds the 57th spot), the amount of overseas projects a typical Hospi-tality Giant works on annually has increased from 19 percent in 2006 to 34 percent in 2011. AvroKo estimates as much as one-third of their business is now located in Asia.

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“Even if there was no money in Asia, we’d still probably be working in Asia right now,” says Mr. Harris.

“We’d be banging our heads against the wall, screaming, ‘Hire us! Hire us!’” Mr. Farmerie chimes in, only half joking.

“I will say that we were very lucky to have been there when we decided that was an inter-est of ours,” adds Ms. O’Neal, “because during the recession Asia was much more active than the States, and it still is.”

They foursome consider themselves lucky in other ways, too, and value their story as a shared one above all else. “Our getting together was as much a lifestyle choice as it was a business deci-sion,” explains Ms. O’Neal. “Being good friends and getting together and doing this work? Oh, that’s good fun! Let’s do that!” said laughs as she pours the last few drops of the Wol!er Estate rosé into Mr. Farmerie’s empty glass.

“Every year since we started all this, we’ve

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"WE ALL REALIZED VERY EARLY ON THAT WE DIDN’T NECESSARILY HAVE TO PLAY BY THE RULES," EXPLAINS MR. FARMERIE.

LILY & BLOOM , HONG KONG (ABOVE , BELOW RIGHT ), PHOTOS BY JASON LANG ; BELOW: THE MONDAY ROOM , NEW YORK , PHOTO BY MICHAEL WEBER , ALL COURTESY OF AVROKO

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written down on a piece of paper whatever we could imagine in our dream worlds of living,” she continues. “In other words, where you wanted to live, how you wanted to live, what you wanted to do, we wrote it all down. A silly exercise, maybe, but we found it somehow alluring.”

“Yeah, and you don’t think about it for years

because you’re so busy,” says Mr. Harris. “But then you’ll go back and look at it, and you’ll see that you wrote something like, ‘What if we could only have our own restaurant? That would be amazing!’ And you read that sitting in your own restaurant. And it’s just like, wow, that actually happened.”

"EVEN IF THERE WAS NO MONEY

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