With its thriving restaurant and hospitality scene, New Orleans was the perfect place for husband-and-wife team Farouki Farouki to set up their full-service architecture and interior design practice. Since its recent founding, Caroline, with a background in interior design, and Sabri, whose CV includes stints at BIG and DS+R, have made their mark on the historic yet continuously emerging city with a variety of interior projects that have tapped into the influx of new restaurants, shops, and landmarks opening their doors. Here, the two talk about their expanding practice.
How many people are in your practice?
There are three of us in New Orleans currently, and one of Caroline's past coworkers is working remotely from New York as a stopgap. We really should be four full-time, and we probably could be five or six given the amount of work that we have.
Why were you originally motivated to start your own practice?
Our overarching motivation was personal independence; having our own practice lets us control our work/life balance. The impetus, though, was having our son, Remy, who was born in New York a little over three years ago. I had returned to BIG after paternity leave, and Caroline was due back at AvroKO very soon. To explain how last-minute our decision to leave New York was, we had committed to a nanny share with a family down the street in Brooklyn. Somewhat inadvertently, we got the opportunity to work on an office-starting type of project in New Orleans, which gave us the confidence to leave our jobs that we both loved. The project never materialized fully, but it got us to move down here, and even though things were difficult at first, we survived, and soon we were flourishing.
Professional autonomy was another big motivation to start our own practice. It is rewarding to look around the room at just your partner and one other teammate after a well-received presentation to a client, who is used to working with much bigger and renowned practices, and know that we pulled off what could easily have been the work of twice as many people. Having control of our own design process also allows us to be very efficient. Efficiency is often not a strong suit of design-driven practices, which is not so good for business. When you are only four people working on eight projects at a time, you cannot afford to waste good ideas. Definitely, exhaustive iterations can foster creativity, but we find our typically rapid forward progress and production to be really rewarding.
Why did you decide to set up shop in New Orleans?
Caroline is originally from Lafayette, Louisiana, which is about two hours west of New Orleans, so this is a homecoming for her. Lafayette is the center of Cajun and Louisiana Creole culture, so it is culturally very rich, but its population is only about 125,000 people, so we did not think it was big enough to sustain our practice. New Orleans is a much bigger city and has a vibrant restaurant and hospitality scene, which makes it a perfect place given her interior design background.
You both have a background working for prestigious firms—Caroline at a AvroKO and Sabri with BIG and others. What have you learned from those experiences that will inform how you run your current practice?
We both feel extremely fortunate to have worked for the firms that we did. They are still very much a part of how we think of ourselves as designers. The most important thing we learned, which sounds obvious but we think can be easily forgotten, is that design is our core responsibility. Designers should focus on design excellence with as much purpose as a structural engineer makes sure a building does not fall over. At all of our previous firms, design and creativity led everything else.
How would you describe the focus of your projects and your practice? You guys come from slightly different backgrounds—retail/hospitality versus cultural/mixed-use. How do you plan on marrying those two interests?
For the most part, our projects to-date have been interior architecture—restaurants, hospitality, and multi-family residential. We knew when we started that interior projects would come more easily to a young practice than ground up architecture. It has been working well that Caroline leads projects from the beginning through Schematic Design, we share responsibility during Design Development, and I produce our construction documents and perform Construction Administration. It is similar to the scope-split between a design architect and an executive architect. Our goal is to grow the architecture part of the office and begin providing clients a truly comprehensive and cohesive project design. The advice we have heard from architects we really respect is to not rush into anything—to keep our heads down, and the architecture part will come.
What have been some of the biggest challenges in starting your own firm?
It took us about a year to figure out how to divide our work so that we were not constantly both trying to do everything. It is a natural instinct, when you are used to working in offices of 50 or 150 people and suddenly find yourself alone, to flail around and try to do everything yourself, but that can be really inefficient and frustrating if there are two of you doing the same things. Eventually, we found our "lanes", and things started working much more smoothly.
Knowing how much to charge for our services is also a big challenge. Much like talking about salary with friends at work, asking another architect for advice about fee feels really taboo. We have learned that the best thing to do is charge what makes sense for us at the time and try not to worry about competitors. It is sobering, though, that in terms of cachet, we are starting from scratch, whereas the offices we used to work for are able to command high fees based on reputation.
It is also true what our professional practice professors said, that there is a lot you have to do other than design when you own your own practice. At our previous offices, there are whole teams of talented people for business development, accounting, and human resources. A prospective client recently told us that our website is "mysterious", which was a polite way of telling us it is painfully out of date. We thought to ourselves that we had better get on that, but we ended up ordering business cards, delivering our Farouki Farouki poster to a construction site, and buying a ream of paper for our printer instead. So, our website is still mysterious.
What are the benefits of having your own practice? And staying small?
It has been almost three years, and we cannot imagine giving this up to work at other offices again. One of the greatest benefits of staying small is that we get to be involved in every aspect of our projects. It is almost inevitable that, as an office grows, people become compartmentalized. A benefit of staying small to our clients is that we are always involved, so they know what to expect from us. Our repeat clients, of which we are fortunate to have a few great ones, know that the lessons we learned from previous projects will be applied to future ones. One last benefit of staying small is that our office lunches out on Fridays still only cost about sixty bucks, depending on where we go.
1 Comment
They are doing great work in a city where it is challenging to do great work! go go go!
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