Are George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg the most prolific design duo that you’ve never heard of? Possibly. The year before Covid hit, the pair had so much work that they racked up 141 trips to different parts of the world between them. Yabu pulls a face. “We are definitely having to rethink that,” he says.
Back in 1980s Toronto, the Canadian partners – in life and in work – had no inkling that one day they would head an international design firm with 125 staff. But today Yabu Pushelberg’s work is everywhere, from the redesign of stores such as Bergdorf Goodman, Barneys, Lane Crawford and Louis Vuitton, to hotels for some of the biggest names, including the Four Seasons, Aman, Hyatt, Marriott and Edition.
In the past few months, the design company has unveiled work in some of the most high-profile projects in Europe including the LVMH-owned art nouveau La Samaritaine department store in Paris, which took nine years to create. It also worked on two London hotels: the Londoner, an unashamedly luxurious, 16-storey, 350-bedroom hotel in Leicester Square, and the sleek, glassy Pan Pacific by Liverpool Street, which Yabu Pushelberg describes as a “Turner landscape painting but with a Chinese brush stroke”.
From the firm’s Manhattan offices, where a Wolfgang Tillmans picture hangs in the background and a Yayoi Kusama pumpkin and an Anish Kapoor piece are just out of Zoom shot, Yabu explains how it all started. “Just after we graduated [having studied interior design at Toronto’s Ryerson University] we were working together on a restaurant and so we both sat at either end of a table to do a drawing. When we finished, it looked as if it had been drawn by one hand; the shadows, the shapes, the way the light streamed through the window,” he says. And so Yabu Pushelberg was born with Pushelberg working as the big-picture strategist and Yabu focusing on the detail.
For the first ten years they had few breaks, andit wasn’t until Bergdorf Goodman came calling at the turn of the millennium that the couple opened their studio in New York. “Toronto’s a great place to start,” Pushelberg says, “but it’s not a great place to end. If you want to design great things you need to see the world.”
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The pair talk excitedly and at breakneck speed, constantly interrupting each other and starting multiple threads. This exuberance and passion is emblematic of their work – unlike most designers, they do not have a signature aesthetic. Whereas the Londoner is full of theatre and playfulness, with its pale pink undulating walls and its fabric-lined whisky bar, the Yabu Pushelberg website features a simple, soulful picture of a stripped back room, beachy wooden slatted walls and colourful beldi rugs. That’s because, Pushelberg says, there is a lot of curiosity in their work and “so a lot of range”. That may explain why their interiors are so varied: high-gloss finishes, bold colour, riotous pattern and statement artwork, as well as pared-back, monastic spaces. “We don’t do things which are thematic; we like to do things which resonate emotionally,” Yabu says. “We have a friend who once told us that he wasn’t consciously aware of the design in our homes, but what we do is capture a feeling which is consistent in all our spaces. I think that’s right.”
The Londoner, Pushelberg thinks, hits the sweet spot in terms of thoughtfulness. “There is a frisson happening in the lobby where you walk in, and the deepest sense of calm in the spa, and yet the hotel is also situated in an area which, what do you people call it? Don’t you Brits say it’s dodgy? But the hotels always go into an area first and then everything follows.”
La Samaritaine, they agree, is another “dodgy” area before adding, self-deprecatingly, that “all we did with that was put some lipstick on it”. At a time when bricks and mortar destinations are struggling, how did they inject vim into a department store that had been dormant for so long? “There were several routes we could have taken,” Yabu says. “Have an ego and do a big intervention, or make it Disneyland. Instead, we wanted to do something that was modern and talked to the existing structure; that way it was heartfelt and appealed to the Parisian as much as it did to the international traveller.” Hence the mix of the historic – the restoration of 16,000 gold leaves, the art nouveau ceramic under the landing and the 270 original oak stairs – as well as the injection of the new, such as polished creamy surfaces.
Of the homes they own – a Victorian house in the leafy suburbs of downtown Toronto, an apartment in New York City’s West Village and a beach shack in Amagansett, New York – it is the last, with its industrial fittings and pared-back flooring, that they love the most.
“We use it to bring people together: family, friends and staff,” Pushelberg says. “We run it as a little inn and cook for them and make sure there are things for them to do. Sometimes we invite families with kids, sometimes we might be playing guitar on the roof looking at the stars and sometimes there are bad boys dancing on the kitchen counter top at 4am.”
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What saddens them is that they were going to work at the Londoner with the legendary lighting designer Ingo Maurer. When they had a meeting with him, Pushelberg says, he was 84 and “had eyes bright and shining, with pink cheeks, and dressed all in green. I turned to George and said, ‘That’s it. That is how we are going to be, like Ingo, working till we die and joyful about what we do.’” Six months later, however, Maurer was dead.
The pair are still trying to work out how to navigate a post-Covid travel landscape and a backlog of projects. Next spring they will be working on seven design collaborations with clients such as B&B Italia, Molteni and various clients for Milan’s Salone fair, as well as working on new hotels in Milan, Phuket and Tokyo.
The links between them? All, the pair insist, will be “beautiful and with people we enjoy working with. Those are the only things that matter.”
yabupushelberg.com
