On a cool, damp morning in New York, Roman & Williams—the noms de guerre of the husband- and-wife designers Stephen Alesch and Robin Standefer—stand on a Nolita street corner looking up at a brand-new building of their own creation. With wood-framed, double-hung windows, intricately detailed brickwork, and the careful proportions of a Park Avenue manse, it seems to be a perfect replica of a time that has never existed. “Memory is important to us,” Standefer says, her hair in a tight bun, wearing a delicately ruffled black peasant blouse. Beside her, Alesch’s keys poke through the pocket of his thickly cabled sweater. With their stalwart building proudly behind them, they resemble the better-looking city relatives of the farm couple in American Gothic, the Grant Wood painting. Standefer grips a Black­Berry in place of a pitchfork, but the intense presence, the sturdiness, is the same.
The catch is how cutting-edge they are—how hugely fashionable—at this precise moment. Rom­an & Williams is arguably the year’s hottest design team—a flimsy honor if ever there was one. Stand­efer and Alesch did Gwyneth Paltrow’s apartment (in lavender) and Kate Hudson’s house. In 2007 they replaced Philippe Starck’s famous lobby at the Royalton. This spring, they completed the interiors for two of New York’s most prominent new hotels: André Balazs’s glamorous new Stan­d­ard, and the Ace, the first East Coast outpost of the eminently hip Seattle brand run by Alex Cal­derwood. And then there is this quiet, little brick apartment house at the edge of Soho, their first from-the-ground-up building and the project closest to their eccentric intent.
They design the same way, digging through the cobwebs of antiques dealers, brickworks, and their own imaginations. “To work with Roman & Williams is to go down the rabbit hole of a fanatical obsession to detail” is how Manning puts it. Their first battle was to push the building back two inches to accommodate the depth and texture they wanted for the facade—the kind of move known to make a New York developer apoplectic. At the Glen-Gery brickworks, in Pennsylvania, they searched the dead stock for molds with the right character, and then insisted on a “troweled-off face”—meaning that a man, rather than a mach­ine or a wire, wipes the wet brick flat. It took months of assuaging the waterproofing consultant’s concerns about leaks and pigeon droppings to get the simple windows they wanted, with deep ledges and serrated jambs. “It’s really a carpenter’s window and not a window designed by lawyers and insurance companies,” Alesch says. Each one is seven feet tall, with sills thick enough for a picnic.
In the months after 9/11, Alesch—like every other architect—sketched his own version of the Freedom Tower: a Gothic skyscraper that could have been out of a 1930s comic book. “I just wanted it to be intense, shooting lightning bolts into the sky,” he says. Alesch, now 43, grew up surfing off the beaches of Malibu and Santa Monica. After college, he got a job doing architectural drafting and applied to the Southern Cal­ifornia Institute of Architects. He was accepted, but never enrolled. “I was like the Jewish grandpa in my peer group,” he recalls. “I had a big heart for hand drawing and traditional architecture. There was no way I could contemplate having that broken apart.” On a visit to New York one summer, he was walking around in a T-shirt when an old man came up to him and said, “What are you doing in your underwear?” Alesch thought to himself, This is where I want to live.
Standefer, 44 years old, grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In the late 1980s, she bounced around the New York City art world, working the desk at the Leo Castelli Gallery and in James Rosenquist’s studio. When she was 24, a friend recommended her as an art consultant for a movie. One afternoon she led Martin Scorsese up to the East Village garret of the artist Chuck Connelly, whose paintings became the centerpiece of “Life Lessons,” Scorsese’s section of the New York Stor­ies triptych. (The other directors were Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola.) Standefer went to Hollywood—never giving up her apartment in New York, she emphasizes—and quickly worked her way up from consultant to production designer, meaning she was responsible for the entire visual look of a film. Realizing she could only do so much with words, Standefer went looking for an architect to help with renderings. Alesch showed up for an interview. Throughout the ’90s they worked on films together, becoming known for sets so real they looked like locations. “We were very interested in creating a world for those actors and that director that did not feel escapist at all,” Standefer says. They married in 2005 in New York’s City Hall, followed by lunch at Balthazar.
Roman & Williams was a side project, the name under which they’d make a piece of furniture between films. It comes from their maternal grand­fathers: William Winters (hers) and Roman Alesch. After working with the pair on Zoolander, Ben Stiller asked them to design his 10,000-square-foot Los Angeles house. Kate Hudson and Eliz­abeth Shue followed. “Because they were movie stars, we were able to make a business out of it,” Stand­efer says. It might sound like a crass admission, but it’s classic Standefer. They carefully cul­ti­vate their image, pushing for press coverage—their bibliography runs two single-space pages—while maintaining an air of exclusivity; they don’t have a formal Web site, for example. And yet they are quick to acknowledge that they obsessed over how to present themselves in an interview—giving the sense that they’re not putting on an act, merely trying harder.
That wasn’t necessarily enough at the Standard. They picked up the job after beating out Yabu Pushelberg, and from the beginning there were a lot of opinions to balance. On top of the strength of André Balazs’s own vision—which means he is never an easy client—was the presence of Shawn Hausman (the designer of previous Standard ho-tels), Polshek Partnership (which was responsible for the building itself, a powerful, nearly brutalist tower that straddles the High Line park), and a team of in-house designers. The finished product is pure spectacle; the credit given to (and taken by) Roman & Williams is harder to parse. In the guest rooms, the tambour walls and garnet bathroom tiles are classic Roman & Williams, somehow simultaneously evoking ocean liners and Span­ish castles. But the lobby, with its long, green catwalk stretching to the curb, seems far too glossy. “André had a challenge for us in that he didn’t want objects that carried a lot of memory,” Alesch says. “He didn’t want it to emote, to remind him of something else. We’re not the most nostalgic people ourselves, so it’s not a hard thing for us to be a little more icy or cleaner with our choices. We can leave nostalgia behind in a heartbeat. It’s no problem at all for us.” He doth protest too much. It’s easy to see that it’s not who they really are—in sharp contrast with the Ace experience, which by all accounts has been more of a mind meld with Calderwood.