George Yabu & Glenn Pushelberg

Yabu Pushelberg is multidisciplinary in every sense of the word: interiors, exteriors, lighting, landscapes, furnishings, graphic design. How do you inform the experiences you create across all practices?

GP: When we were young, we did office design first, then retail design—then moved into restaurants, bars, and hotels around 2000. But we’ve always done residential projects, too, and each typology informs the next and vice versa. It’s not a linear direction of influence, so you learn from each of them. Working in residential, you learn how to make a hotel more personal. In hotels, you might learn to be more aspirational and experimental in designing bathrooms, which you can then bring back to residential projects. We’re working from social aspects, and how society changes. That’s reflective of how you buy something, why you buy something, why you live where you live. Today we live, work, and play simultaneously in many spaces, where it was more segmented before. We can draw from hotels because the hotel environment is more segmented into subsections of personal choice, still within the cohesive whole. GY: It’s no longer about the label of the space, but about the connection you feel to the space. GP: We worked on a very bespoke, classic project in London, 1 Grosvenor Square. They built their own hospitality group for their five or six residences, so they have concierge services, valet services, spas—many of the amenities that hotels have. So all of this is coming together. The last 10 years were more about the quantity of amenities rather than the quality of experience, which is now changing, and that comes from the root of hotels.

Since its inception more than four decades ago, Yabu Pushelberg has accepted no boundaries, morphing from a traditional Toronto interior design studio into an award-winning global practice. We talked shop with the firm’s eponymous founders—both Order of Canada inductees who count the AD 100 Hall of Fame and Elle Décor’s A-List among their endless accolades—to learn what makes them tick.

At Waterline Square, you’ve helped craft a truly immersive environment. What moments did you set out to create?

GP: Waterline Square features a very spacious lobby, and we started to think of the lobby not as a traditional entryway, but as a place to extend your life into. There are places to work in the lobby, places to have a cocktail. There are quiet corners, and the lobby has a relationship to nature. GY: Waterline Square is one of the very few residential developments in Manhattan where you can actually see from one end of the building through the other end. That’s really rare in New York. You can see across the entire lobby to the park. Usually it’s cheek-by-jowl, building after building, block after block. It was important to us to take advantage of that opportunity to create a sort of continuity. GP: Because the lobby is on two levels, it can feel like looking out from the side of a mountain. The key to the lobby was not to make it monumental, but to make it graceful and to create intimacy despite the scale being quite big. There are moments, screened off or in corners, so that, like a hotel lobby, there are always places for quiet. You can people watch, or be in the scene if you want to be in the scene—another way in which it follows those notions of the hotel.

"I think there’s a real opportunity to create something beautiful, and this is an example of a real need for an amenity in a residential building—not just having more amenities but having appropriate amenities."

What trends do you see guiding residential development, and specifically community spaces, in the next few years?

GP: This is a double-edged sword. Right now, everyone’s focused on making at-home work environments. How long this will last? I think the future will tell us. GY: Amenities are becoming more important, too, especially as spaces become smaller. GP: I hope we’ll see more public spaces, with quiet spaces within them. Spaces that are more communal, but that feel more residential and afford all the various elements you want to have. The majority of people that want to work from home tend to be families—so office buildings are bringing more amenities to accommodate their workers’ needs. We don’t think that things will go back to being 100% one way or the other, but we do predict another change coming in the dynamic between residential spaces and community workplaces. GY: We recently worked on a residential development where we installed a private office. A person could book that to talk to their attorney outside their apartment, or interview a potential childcare provider. People can have that at home—but outside the residence to keep that part of life separate. GP: Ping-pong tables are nice for a while, but how do you truly create a space where people feel comfortable, where there’s a sense of privacy, where they don’t feel alone? Because that is the danger of working alone—you become unsocialized. I think there’s a real opportunity to create something beautiful, and this is an example of a real need for an amenity in a residential building—not just having more amenities but having appropriate amenities.

What design details tend to be the most overlooked by the common eye in your designs?

GP: Lighting. Lighting is the single most important element, especially because it changes your mood. Generally, good hotels put a lot of effort into lighting. The lighting changes from day to night, and there’s a consideration for the quality and color of light, how it washes across surfaces, which is generally not as sophisticated in as many residences—yet.

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GP: Each practice is an extension of the way we live and the values we bring to each element of how we live. In every discipline, we like to work with respect and trust, whether that’s something you build with staff or vendors or clients. We are of course always striving for perfection—which is not achievable, but we always look for it. We also look for change and new ways of thinking; we don’t like old patterns, and I think that we live like that in every way. We’re curious about many things: food, music, art, society, people. Even the seismic shift in the way people think because of the pandemic—we’re curious about how we think now, and how we adapt. We always want to be a part of the conversation and never be stuck. That informs each of our disciplines, and in turn, our work as a whole. Our good friend once said to us: you probably won’t be remembered for your work, but for your relationships, and how you brought people into your life and conducted yourself among friends and family, staff, and clients. We try not to think in labels.

What learnings from hospitality design has the firm applied in residential commissions?

Inside Two Waterline Square on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where YP designed both the residential interiors and grand-proportioned public areas.

A four-foot-tall sculptural pumpkin, custom-commissioned from Yayoi Kusama, greets visitors to Yabu Pushelberg's Toronto studio.

YP was recently enlisted to reimagine New York's Park Lane Hotel, originally designed by Emery Roth & Sons for developer Harry Helmsley (above and below left-right).

The lobby (below) and indoor-outdoor lounge (right) at Two Waterline Square.

Park Lane Hotel (above and below-left).

Waterline Square photography by Evan Joseph. Studio and Park Lane Hotel images courtesy of Yabu Pushelberg.