Telling a story

After their first professional incarnation as film set designers in Los Angeles, Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch founded their agency in New York in 2002. From their early experience they learned to create spaces with a soul and a story to tell. The Ace, the Standard Highline, the Freehand… Today the duo has a long list of fashionable hotels on their résumé. Latest projects. They recently completed an extension of La Mercerie, the restaurant of their Guild concept store in SoHo, plus their first hotel outside the United States: the NoMad London, in a 19th-century building in the heart of Covent Garden. Plus a handful of homes on the East Coast as well as the actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s new villa in California.