Jeffrey Beers: 2024 Hall of Fame Tribute

How Jeffrey Beers Expanded His Auspicious Career

Beers began his career auspiciously. At the suggestion of his Rhode Island School of Design mentor, glass artist Dale Chihuly, Beers applied for and won a Fulbright scholarship that took him to Rio de Janeiro, where he worked for Oscar Niemeyer for two years, imbibing the emotional, sculptural nature of Brazilian modernism. Subsequent time at the office of I.M. Pei taught Beers the power of detail, the importance of diplomacy, and the equal weight that should be given to form and feeling. After eight years with Pei, he struck out on his own, making a splash with JBI’s inaugural project, in 1985: Bar Lui, its 180-foot bar—billed the city’s longest—celebrating the space’s long-and-narrow proportions and setting the tone for a portfolio that would make social connection the design focal point.

JBI quickly expanded with high-profile Manhattan venues like China Grill and Fiamma that demonstrated Beers’s keen awareness of atmosphere. His spaces had a theatrical precision that delighted guests while fulfilling the operator’s needs—choreographing movement from bar to table, planning sightlines and light levels, and designing for seamless service. This talent resonated with top culinary talents; over the years, Beers collaborated with celebrity chefs Masaharu Morimoto, Gordon Ramsay, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and especially Daniel Boulud, with whom he created five restaurants across the globe, beginning with DB Brasserie at the Wynn Las Vegas, in 2006.

Exploring A Long-Lasting Legacy

Though Beers was synonymous with NYC nightlife in the early years, he was also one of the first big-name designers to put a more refined stamp on Sin City as it was morphing in the late ’90’s into a haute culinary destination. With venues like Rum Jungle, Tabu Ultra Lounge, and Japonais, he nailed the sybaritic flourishes that such a context required but he also brought nuance and polish to the game.

His emotive approach translated well to hotels, too. Beers’s first major top-to-bottom resort was the Cove at Atlantis on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, in 2007, and he was also given the honor and responsibility of upgrading such storied destinations as Gloria Palace in Rio de Janeiro and The Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. JBI has teamed with top brands including Fairmount, Four Seasons, Hard Rock, and Omni, creating transporting environs rounded in modernism that fused the magic and joie de vivre of the travel experience with more practical needs of guests and operators. In the last decade or so, as residential developers increasingly borrowed from the hotel playbook, Beers’s expertise extended naturally into that genre, evident in his concepts for iconic residential projects like One West End and One Fifty Seven in New York and Alyx at Echelon Seaport and Ritz-Carlton Residences in Boston.

Beers’s influence went beyond the built environment. He was a mentor, guide, inspirer, friend, and cheerleader, renowned for giving you his full attention, making you feel you were the only person in the room. He treated everyone the same, from the plumber on the job site to celebrity clients like Jay-Z, for whom he designed the 40/40 Club and Roc Nation headquarters, both in New York. As a leader, he was known for fostering a collaborative, creative spirit within his studio. He often said he looked for “good dance partners” in his team, bringing together people who both shared his enthusiasm and invested their personal passions. Among them are partners Nora Liu-Kanter, Michael Pandolfi, and Tim Rooney, longtime colleagues who now guide the firm alongside COO Julia Choi, CFO Jeffrey Ashey, and the older of his two sons, Justin, a former real-estate exec—a team Beers handpicked when succession planning. Such continuity ensures that Beers’s ethos—creating spaces that connect people and connect with people—remains at the heart of his firm’s award-winning work.

Take A Look At Jeffrey Beers’ Hospitality Designs

Discover Jeffrey Beers’s Residential + Product Designs

DIFFA: 2024 Interior Design Hall of Fame Tribute

The Evolution of DIFFA’s Mission

Scientific advances over the decades have made the disease both easily preventable and manageable, but that certainly wasn’t the case in 1984 when DIFFA was founded, out of real desperation. At the time, many in the design world were losing friends, colleagues, and loved ones to AIDS, which was largely being ignored by the government and even the private sector. Professionals from various creative fields, from fashion to interiors, banded together to assist vulnerable community members who weren’t getting help—making sure they could pay bills, get to doctor appointments, and much more.

Since then, DIFFA has granted over $57 million to hundreds of entities that bolster under-resourced populations throughout the country; beneficiaries include Alpha Workshops, God’s Love We Deliver (GLWD), Visual AIDS for the Arts, and Housing Works. An important distinction is that DIFFA provides unrestricted grants, allowing flexible spending so agencies are empowered to use the money in a way that is most effective for them. “We can help keep the lights on, we can help them get new equipment, we can help pay their staff, we can help with the basic office necessities—basically, whatever they need to keep running, which is crucial,” Roberson says.

DIFFA Boasts Strong Leadership

Strong leadership and an army of dedicated volunteers have been essential to the long-term success of the organization, which currently hosts chapters in four cities: Chicago, Dallas, New York, and San Francisco. During a recent 40th-anniversary benefit bash, former executive director David Sheppard lauded the contributions of design-industry heavy-weights who’ve guided DIFFA over the years, including chair emeriti Cindy Allen, this magazine’s editor in chief, and architect and Rockwell Group founder David Rockwell. “Without David, DIFFA’s doors would have closed after the 2008 crash,” Sheppard notes. “And companies that said ‘no’ to me for decades said ‘yes’ the minute Cindy became chairman.”

Allen, who served in that role from 2012 through 2023, when she handed the reins to Thomas Polucci, HOK’s director of interiors and workplace design, was instrumental in galvanizing the commercial side of the profession for donations, fundraising events like Dining by Design (rebranded in 2022 as DIFFA by Design), and programs such as Specify with Care, whereby affiliates such as Maya Romanoff and Wolf-Gordon donate a percentage of profits to the cause. During her tenure, Allen rallied the support of design firms including Gensler and M Moser Associates and brands ranging from Shaw and Steelcase. “From Giants of Design firms to giant manufacturers, our industry friends really stepped up to the plate to become valiant supporters,” Allen says. “We’ve come full circle, from our industry being majorly impacted by HIV/AIDS to our industry having a major impact.”

For Rockwell, a Hall of Fame icon and inductee whose firm is also celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, the decision to join DIFFA in 1994 was extremely personal. “I had just lost my brother Rick to AIDS and was in the throes of grief,” he recalls. “It was so cathartic to be in a community with designers and artists who were as passionate as I was about trying to help save lives in any way we could; being able to act when I felt powerless was so important. It’s been a gift to watch DIFFA grow and now deliver on this new mission of addressing the most pressing societal challenges, like housing and mental health.” These are indeed complex issues, but ones our industry remains well positioned to solve, especially when we join forces to supercharge our strategic and creative capabilities.

Explore DIFFA’s Outreach and Initiatives Over The Years

Discover DIFFA’s Grantees + Beneficiaries

Holly Hunt: 2024 Interior Design Hall of Fame Inductee

Even if you never met Holly Hunt, you could pick her out in a crowd. She is a doyenne of an exquisitely understated, timeless modern style, who worships fine materials and artisanship and is heavily into neutrals. That woman with the perfectly coiffed silver hair and contrasting slim, dark jacket, surrounded by museum-quality artwork and impeccably tailored furnishings? Yep, that’s her.

How Holly Hunt Changed The Industry Game

Hunt did away with all that. Expanding first to Minneapolis in 1985, then New York’s D&D Building in 1994 and Washington in 1999, ultimately reaching a total of 12 showrooms nationwide, she revealed designer net prices (much to the industry’s disgruntlement) and insisted on taking responsibility for orders even when it cut into her profits. She also took the radical step of creating showrooms that looked like places where clients might actually want to live, with architectural detailing, artwork, and a mix of products and styles.

In these rooms she displayed pieces by such established designers as Vladimir Kagan and Rose Tarlow, helping to turn talents into luminaries, and lesser-knowns that she discovered, including Los Angeles glass artist and lighting designer Alison Berger and French sculptor and furniture maker Christian Astuguevieille. She hired the avant-garde graphics studio Thirst to mold a sophisticated modern image in print advertising and marketing materials. The common thread binding everything together was superior quality.

In the early ’90’s, Hunt met Christian Liaigre in Paris. She could see by the French furniture designer’s sleek, monochromatic clothing, which was much like her own, that they were creative soulmates. “Fashion sets the tone for everything in design,” she says. Soon she was manufacturing and selling Liaigre in the U.S., transforming the look of American interiors so that they glowed with sleek, dark woods and creamy textiles. “It was art collectors who were buying it, who understood the clarity and cleanliness and classic proportions,” she recalls. The ultimate seal of approval came in 1997, when André Balazs’s Mercer Hotel opened in downtown Manhattan with Liaigre-designed interiors.

Inside Holly Hunt’s Notable Showrooms

Hunt was equally agile when the 2008 recession hit, streamlining and restructuring the company, which had 250 employees by that time. Two years later, just as it was returning to economic health, Liaigre sold his business to private investors. “We’re going to design our way out of this,” she told her staff, launching Holly Hunt Modern, a collection that was even more profitable than her partnership with the Frenchman had been.

Some of Hunt’s successes were so big they exerted gravitational pulls. In her book, she describes offers she couldn’t refuse that led her to part with things she dearly loved, namely her company. In 2014, Knoll bought it for $110 million. She retained her CEO position for two years and oversaw the planned expansion of showrooms in Dallas and L.A. She remained a consultant until 2019, while designing such projects as a penthouse at the Surf Club in Miami Beach.

Today, she presides over House of Hunt, a boutique interior architecture and furniture studio in Chicago that weaves together many creative strands at every scale, from the design of such products as the Dune sofa for HOLLY HUNT to the renovation and development of whole homes, with residences in Colorado and Florida among the firm’s current and recently completed projects. Hunt still doesn’t have a business plan and that’s just the way she likes it—being challenged as she goes.

Explore More of Holly Hunt’s Interior Designs

Discover Holly Hunt’s Collaborations

A Look At Trailblazing Product + Branding Projects

INC Architecture & Design Partners: 2024 Interior Design Hall of Fame Inductees

Adam Rolston, Drew Stuart, and Gabriel Benroth, the cofounding partners of INC Architecture & Design, joke that together they make one great principal. Rolston, the creative and managing director, is a conceptual thinker who steers the overall aesthetic of a project. Stuart, the development and construction director, is a detail-oriented people person who helps realize the design on-site. And Benroth, the studio and information director, is a systems guy who creates innovative, interactive renderings. Since they started INC in 2006, the firm has grown to 50 employees—and scored such marquee commissions as the master plan and renovation of the rink level at Rockefeller Center—but each partner still works on every project. “That’s our secret sauce: We’re owners who are deeply engaged,” Stuart begins. They also love what they do, and their youthful enthusiasm is evident in INC’s distinctive work.

INC is based in New York. As the name implies, the firm is a collaborative practice: It is an acronym for incunditas necessarius creo, or joy utility craft, terms that allude to the partners’ roles. “We took the design of our studio as seriously as the design of our projects,” Rolston says. Thanks to Benroth, who, while interning at UC’s Center for the Study of Practice in Architecture in the late ’90’s, had collected organizational handbooks and analyzed industry metrics from other architectural firms, the trio developed a structure that prioritizes cooperation, transparency, efficiency, and technology. “Every project is unique, which takes a lot of time because you’re not copying and pasting,” Benroth says. “If we have clear processes in place, it frees people up to be more creative and engaged in the work.” That includes interior and exterior architecture and furniture design; sometimes, INC is the architect of record as well. “We like to have control of the whole scope,” Benroth adds.

Learn About INC Architecture & Design’s Innovative Projects

At first, INC took on multifamily building renovations in Manhattan, as well as exhibition designs for the Jewish Museum and Rolston’s own weekend house in Upstate New York. They were relatively small projects, but the partners approached them as they always do: “We aim to be honest, thoughtful, and earnest with our ideas,” Stuart says.

That philosophy is apparent in INC’s industrial, sustainable interiors at 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge, a 2012 commission that marked a turning point. Developer and Hall of Famer Barry Sternlicht, CEO of Starwood Capital Group, entrusted the then-unknowns with conceiving the brand’s flagship. Rolston, Stuart, Benroth, and their team devised greenery-filled spaces that are of their place on the Brooklyn waterfront yet avoid pastiche. There’s a story behind every plank of reclaimed wood. The rooftop pool affords breathtakingly panoramic New York City views. All of which added up to the project earning myriad awards and landing on the September 2017 cover of Interior Design.

At the Line DC hotel in Washington—which, like the 1, opened in 2017—INC balanced the site’s history as a landmarked former church with the offbeat sensibility of the surrounding Adams Morgan neighborhood. A few years later, over the COVID pandemic, the firm completed the public spaces for the Morrow Hotel Washington, a ground-up project in the nearby NoMa area that is “airy, open, and joyful,” Rolston notes, a much-needed dose of optimism for the city.

How INC Architecture & Design Founders Embrace Emotional Connection 

This approach takes a certain humility and empathy with the end user and a sensitivity to inclusivity for all. It’s about absorbing the invisible but ever-present history and meaning of a place and translating it into something physical, be it a floor plan or fluted panel. Rolston, Stuart, and Benroth “have a fundamental compassionate nature toward human use and human life,” Tsao picks up the thread. “That’s why their work is compelling and unique. . . and will last.”

A Peek At Top Hospitality Projects

INC Architecture & Design’s Foray Into The Residential Space

David Galullo: 2024 Interior Design Hall of Fame Inductee

Call it DNA, call it destiny: David Galullo was fated for a career in design and architecture. Credit his late father, an Italian American builder and visionary who passed on a worldview that became the underpinning of his son’s multidisciplinary practice. “He taught me to see the world as an opportunity for improvement rather than something completed,” begins the consummate professional who, although a licensed architect, does not necessarily call himself such. “I don’t want limits.”

Learn How David Galullo’s Rapt Studio Breaks Boundaries

Work is a matter of gathering, too. Each project team assembles talents spanning the full creative spectrum: architecture, design, graphics, branding, marketing, and communications. With no siloing by skill set, everyone has a voice and is free to critique any part of a proposal, not just their area of expertise. This not only results in an integrated response to each brief but also helps shape Rapt’s organization, with its three studios viewed holistically rather than as competing profit centers. “We’re breaking down barriers that other firms may have,” Galullo emphasizes.

More than 70 percent of Rapt’s practice centers on the workplace, principally in the gaming, apparel, media, and tech sectors. Its roster of completed projects lists many big names: Google, Goop, The North Face, and Tinder for starters. Current or recently finished assignments include consolidating CNN’s Atlanta operations into longtime-client Warner Bros. Discovery’s seven-building Techwood campus; relocating online gaming enterprise Roblox’s headquarters into a 180,000-square- foot building in San Matteo, California; and having just completed language app Duolingo’s New York offices at 4 World Trade Center, going on to renovate and expand the company’s headquarters in Pittsburgh. Rapt’s global planning for international financial services corporation Macquarie Group supports the company’s real estate operations worldwide, providing local design firms with a template to work from, while for real estate developer Hines, another global enterprise, Rapt crafted regional headquarters at West Edge, a mixed-use development in L.A.

Explore Rapt Studio’s Encyclopedic Portfolio

Rapt’s branding projects range from Bishop Ranch, an idyllic 585-acre business and residential park in San Ramon, California, to Tishman Speyer’s Merge, an amenity-rich, four-building, 5-acre business campus in Seattle. “Things just pop up,” Galullo says of Rapt’s encyclopedic portfolio. How about a kit-of-parts play-book guiding a retail rollout for the California cannabis concern Embarc Dispensaries as a sign of the times?

“People are more than their job descriptions,” he says, emphasizing the importance of creating adaptable workplaces that accommodate varied sensory needs and cognitive styles. Galullo’s articulate thoughtfulness has made him something of a media darling, consistently covered over his four-decade career. So, tell us some- thing no one else knows. “I just got my Italian passport,” he gleefully responds. To which we can only reply, in bocca al lupo!—his ancestral homeland’s idiom for good luck.

See Workplace Designs From David Galullo

Discover How Rapt Studio Shapes Top Brands

Suzanne Tick: 2023 Interior Design Hall of Fame Inductee

Material innovator Suzanne Tick has the future on speed dial. She embraced sustainability before most of us knew what the word meant, developed a CEU on the post-gender society before it even happened, experimented with 3D knitting before it was a thing, and imbued the woven surfaces that surround commercial interiors with characteristics of transparency, digitalism, and illumination before we realized we needed them. Then there’s the fact that her New York–based textile brand, Luum, launched its Fabric of Space collection, with patterns based on star trails and the expanding universe, the very day the James Webb Space Telescope images of same were publicly released. “Everyone thought we were in cahoots with NASA!” she jokes.

No, Tick is not conspiring with the government’s space-research arm, but she has collaborated with a galaxy of big-name brands during her four-decade career: Tarkett, Tandus Centiva, and 3form are just a few for which she’s conceived upholstery and drapery fabrics, high-performance carpeting and broadloom, and cement-tile and LVT flooring. She has enjoyed a longstanding partnership with Skyline Design, for which she conceives etched panels that bring textile softness to hard glass, and maintains an active fine-art practice realizing tapestries, custom textiles, and experimental handweavings for such clients as the Gates Foundation and BlackRock.

Suzanne Tick on Her Futuristic Approach to Design

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For Tick, Sustainability is Top of Mind

Her approach has always been holistic and sustainable, ranging from development of raw material and structures to revamping of manufacturing methods. At Luum, for instance, “The majority of what we do is to develop new fibers and invent constructions. That’s why our fabrics feel different.” Her handweavings also utilize novel materials—salvaged objects like dry-cleaning hangers. For a financial company commission, she’s currently warp-and-wefting two centuries’ worth of shredded ledgers; for a paint brand, she’s weaving cut-up sample discards.

Tick, a self-described “fourth-generation recycler,” comes about her salvage mindset honestly. Business at her dad’s scrap-metal yard was the main dinner table topic growing up. At the same time, her family was “very cultured and creative”—her mother was a graphic and set designer—and tapped into Eastern philosophy. “My dad had all the books: the Bhagavad Gita, a library of Ram Dass.” Also stacked on those shelves were her mom’s interiors magazines. Tick owes a lot to those glossies, which helped her home in on a vocational track when, late in her college tenure as a printmaker experimenting with etching fiber textures onto copper, she set about figuring out what the heck to do after graduation. “Flipping through them, I saw ads by Jack Lenor Larsen, Brunschwig et Fils, Scalamandré. I thought I could work for a company that makes fabrics like those—and that I had to move to New York to do it.”

Meditation Meets Design Innovation

Manhattan proved an energizing yet scary place at the time. “I arrived at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Designers we were creating custom orders for would just stop calling us back.” To handle the stress, she tried Zen meditation, but it never stuck. She gave the pursuit of higher consciousness another try seven years ago, after a period of discontent despite her many achievements, which at this point included a TEDxNavesink talk and work exhibited at international museums. A last-minute opportunity to attend an introductory Vedic workshop coincided with a weeklong staycation, her first in 30-odd years. She found the mantra-based practice transformative, and since 2020 has been teaching it to others. It’s become a cornerstone of her studio culture that she credits with unlocking higher levels of collective creativity. “If I could get more firms to realize how incredible this practice is for design teams! Your awareness becomes open, everything becomes much clearer, you just see what needs to be done.”

Part of de-stressing her nervous system, she continues, has involved “figuring out what I can do to be of help.” She’s doubled down on her commitment to giving back via free weaving workshops and serving on the board of The Light Inside, which teaches meditation to prison inmates and corrections officers. Tick pays it forward to Mother Earth, too. Back in the ’90’s, she was the brains behind Resolution, the first-ever solution-dyed panel fabric (and the first Knoll Textile product to sell 1 million yards); today, her studio recycles all textile waste it produces (almost a ton annually) and has been instrumental in shifting our perception of circularity via envelope-pushing product designs attuned to nature yet equally informed by technology, craft, and human ingenuity.

Watch the Hall of Fame Documentary Featuring Suzanne Tick

Explore Textiles Design by Suzanne Tick

Installations by Suzanne Tick on Display

David Rockwell: 2023 Interior Design Hall of Fame Icon

“Chopin’s Ballade No. 3 in A-flat major,” David Rockwell replies when asked what he’s working on next. He is fresh off a private recital of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, accompanied by a full orchestra (as well as notable guests Robert DeNiro, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jane Krakowski). The architect returned to classical piano lessons in 2016, picking up where he left off in childhood. In fact, at the Rockwell Group headquarters in New York, a former print room now serves as one of his practice studios. Just as Gershwin’s rhapsody has come to define the Jazz Age, the name David Rockwell has become virtually synonymous with the epitome of modern-day hospitality design. But his oeuvre extends far beyond restaurants and hotels.

“He manages to see the beauty in our diversity, using food, fabric, music, art, and design as his canvas to unite us all,” says restaurateur and Food Network personality Melba Wilson. She first worked with Rockwell 30 years ago on a proposed refresh of Minton’s Playhouse jazz club. More recently, as president of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, Wilson partnered with Rockwell Group on DineOut NYC, a 2020 initiative that developed a prototype of outdoor dining to keep restaurants throughout the boroughs—including her Melba’s in Harlem—in business during the early months of the pandemic. It’s one of the latest in a series of pro-bono projects instigated by Rockwell. Others include Stoop NYC, designing the annual Citymeals on Wheels fundraising event, and serving as the chairman of DIFFA for more than two decades.

“David is the opposite of the designer who is locked in a kind of hermetic, self-referential world,” states architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who has followed Rockwell from the beginning. “He’s interested in architecture as it relates to the human experience.” Rockwell applies that human-centered approach to the design process itself, engaging consultants with critical questions and inviting them to be a part of the conversation.

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Get Ready for 2024: See what’s next for Interior Design‘s Hall of Fame event with a peek at what we’re planning for the 40th annual gala. Discover Hall of Fame details.

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He is known for bringing in unexpected creative collaborators—choreographers, for example. A culture of collaboration is also in effect every day at all three studios. “It’s the thing I appreciate most,” says Rockwell Group partner Shawn Sullivan, who has been with the firm 26 years. Partner Greg Keffer agrees: “It’s led to our cross-disciplinary approach—and to a plurality of personalities and talents experimenting.” Keffer is the partner in charge of the Spain office, led day-to-day by principal Eva Longoria, a Madrid native who interned at RG New York as a student. “We’re constantly trying to break the boundary to do something even more special,” says Longoria, who adds that her studio is 80 percent female architects and designers—the same majority as RG’s executive team.

Their most recent collaboration is the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center, which opened in Washington in October. It’s RG’s first higher-education project. “We brought fresh eyes to creating opportunities for connectivity and spontaneous encounters,” the architect notes. Many firms lean into a practice area where they’ve found success. But Rockwell makes a point of exploring new territory, possibly a function of his trademark curiosity. Adds Bloomberg: “David has a rare combination of imaginative creativity, technical brilliance, and deep civic-mindedness.”

Watch the Hall of Fame Documentary Featuring David Rockwell

Explore Hospitality Designs by David Rockwell

A Glimpse at Showstopping Set Designs

Higher Education, Transportation, and More Institutional Designs by Rockwell Group

A Closer Look at Works by 2023 Interior Design Hall of Fame Icon, David Rockwell

Hall of Fame: Claudy Jongstra

Established in 1985, the Hall of Fame awards honor design professionals who have contributed to the growth and prominence of the interior design field. Previous Hall of Fame inductees include legendary figures such as: Antonio Citterio, Clodagh, Thierry W. Despont, Frank Gehry, Albert Hadley, Andrée Putman, David Rockwell, Lauren Rottet, Philippe Starck, and Robert A.M. Stern, to name a few.

Watch the story of Dutch textile designer and artist Claudy Jongstra, 2022 inductee into the Interior Design Hall of Fame.