DESIGNERS’ HOME I GREAT SPACE
Summer getaway exudes style and comfort.
AS OWNERS of one of the world’s premier design firms in the luxury hospitality and retail sectors, Kitchener-born Glenn Pushelberg and partner George Yabu have a rich portfolio of spectacular venues reflecting their commitment to quality and innovation around the globe. One highly personal project stands apart. It’s a summer house set in the sand dunes of eastern Long Island that was completed last summer to become their fourth home. >>
>> The pair bought the property five years ago, camping out on summer weekends in the original house while they developed their vision for the site.
It took two years to arrive at the final look and layout, and another two years to build the house. Although they’ve extensively renovated their other homes, the house in the Hamptons summer colony of Amagansett is the first they’ve built for themselves from scratch, Pushelberg says in a telephone interview. Each home is intentionally different. The street view of their Toronto home is of a Victorian cottage; nothing suggests the rear wall is glass, overlooking a ravine and meandering creek below. In Miami, the front yard of their 1950s bungalow is a garden of bamboo. “All you see is a door set in the landscape,” Pushelberg says. “It’s quite magical.” Their New York apartment, one of nine in the building, has an eclectic collection of furnishings and a panoramic view of the Hudson River.
Pushelberg says all four locations really do feel like home to the couple who, despite constant travel to design projects spread over 15 countries, make a point of getting to know their neighbours, inviting friends to dinner and encouraging family members to visit.
Pushelberg attended Kitchener Collegiate Institute for two years before transferring to Cameron Heights Collegiate Institute for the last three years of high school. He had no idea what to do after Grade 13.
“I liked arts programs, but I was better at math and geography,” he says. “I started the school newspaper; I’m not the best writer, but I’m a good organizer. I also liked the notion of hotels and considered the hospitality program at Guelph, but I wanted a bigger city and knew if I went to Guelph I’d have to commute and live at home.” He didn’t like writing exams so a program emphasizing creative hands-on assignments was appealing. The Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) accepted him, but he couldn’t see any money in art as a career.
Interior design also interested him because it’s both rational and intuitive. He opted for a bachelor of applied arts in interior design at Ryerson University where he met Yabu, who was in the same program. (In 2003, Ryerson awarded honorary doctorates to its design-star alumni.)
After graduation, the men took on a variety of design projects that helped pay the bills, but weren’t artistically satisfying. “In the first five years, we did a lot of regurgitation of stores in malls and made $50,000 a year,” Pushelberg says. “One day a contractor we were working with told us to focus on our passion.”
They took his advice to heart, opened their own firm, welcomed free dinners from family and friends, and went in search of better projects.
“We approached everything very naively, but we survived doing what we love to do,” Pushelberg says. “We didn’t know a lot of people, but we did know that everyone knows someone else. We started very simply until we got to a scale where we couldn’t work that way any longer.”
Pushelberg took over marketing, sales and client communication; Yabu was dedicated to the studio. In time, they realized they also needed a New York presence to >>
>> attract five-star clientele such as the Four Seasons hotel chain.
Today, 120 employees ranging from architects, fashion and product designers to administrative staff work at the two offices. They also call on contract workers for specific projects.
“We’re like symphony conductors,” Pushelberg says, “and now we’ve come full circle. We’ve hired senior people to manage and I’m back in the studio with George.”
Among their retail clients are Louis Vuitton, Bergdorf Goodman, Tiffany & Co., Kate Spade and Carolina Herrera. Close to home, their work can be seen in The Room at the flagship Hudson’s Bay store in Toronto.
The firm has 50 or 60 projects underway at any time, and turns down two or three projects a week. Visiting each site keeps the pair on the road at least a third of the time. In a 10-day period in late February, for instance, Pushelberg flew from Paris to Toronto, took a day in New York, spent the weekend in Miami and went on to meetings in Shanghai and Bangkok.
While corporate projects are their core business, they design two or three private residences each year, either because they are too interesting to refuse or because the request comes from an existing client, such as a Californian who is downsizing to a 12,000-square-foot home.
As for whether their undergraduate degrees prepared them for the complexities of their operation, Pushelberg says that like so many entrepreneurs he got “an MBWA — a masters of business by walking around.”
In designing their beach house, the partners assumed their natural roles, Push- elberg as planner, Yabu as detail person. “We’ve been together so long we know what each of us is good at,” Pushelberg says.
“We want every home to be different. In Amagansett, there’s no pretence, no formality. We wanted honesty of materials and a super huge kitchen where we could have eight or nine people cooking.”
The 2,857-square-foot house, clad in vertical grain western red cedar, took two years to build. The ground floor includes two guest bedrooms and a bunk room. Up one level is the master suite and an open-concept living and dining area with a wood-burning fireplace. The floor is oak, the planks heat-treated to darken the colour and create a more irregular texture. The interior walls are panelled in rift-cut ash with a white wash oil finish.
At one end of the room, a steel-framed window between the kitchen and sitting
areas allows cooks their own working space while keeping them in the conversation.
Retractable glass walls open to the ocean breeze. Exterior sliding wood shutters soften the look of the house and filter bright sunlight if desired. At night, the shutters make the house look, in Yabu’s words, like a wood and paper lantern when inside lamps are lit. In addition to the sandy beach, the house has a rooftop terrace, a wrap-around deck on the upper level and, at ground level, a covered patio equipped with a designer picnic table, barbecue and dumb waiter connecting to the kitchen. The living area has a large round dinner table, a long sofa with plenty of pillows and colourful rugs. Some furnishings are from Avenue Road, the furniture and lighting retail store that Yabu and Pushelberg opened in a renovated 1852 brick building in Toronto’s Leslieville. Avenue Road also has a 5,000-square-foot showroom in New York. Pushelberg and Yabu try to spend every summer weekend in Amagansett, travelling like mad through the week to make their schedules work. They held a staff picnic on the beach last summer and plan to open the house for fundraising events. Amagansett is small and somewhat remote, but if a high-flying social life was their goal it’s available elsewhere in the Hamptons. “That’s not at all what we are as people,” Pushelberg says. “To us, dressing up in fancy clothes for a big party on the lawn is not taking a weekend break.”
East of Amagansett lies the surfers’ destination, Montauk, but nearby East Hampton has good restaurants if they want to go out for a nice dinner. Last December, the men were appointed officers of the Order of Canada, cited for their contributions to design excellence internationally “by bringing their creative outlook to public spaces and for promoting the Canadian design industry.”
It’s quite a life, quite a fabulous career. “We have to pinch ourselves sometimes,” Pushelberg says. >>