I’ve never been fully sure just what The Apartment does. After interviewing the founder, Stefan Boublil, I found out that this confusion stems from the fact that they do everything. Really. No project is too far-fetched, as long as they find it interesting. They’ve successfully avoided putting themselves in a box. Stefan is strikingly philosophical, and his positive advice can benefit anyone, no matter what your field. www.theapt.com
What advice do you have for creative entrepreneurs?
Live your life. It seems so cliche and obvious, but living your life is the only thing that allows you to discover things. Fearlessly go forwards and taste new things, whether they are countries, or people, or foods, or emotions. Put yourself out there and live a life that is tremendous. Whatever you invest in yourself will eventually pay dividends in your world.
Skills can be learned by anybody. We have schools; we have ways to take advantage of people who go to schools. We’re set up for that stuff. What we’re not set up for very well is the nourishment of the self. That’s your own responsibility. There’s a person right there in the mirror. Take a good look. Take the time to get to know that person. That will pay off in anything that you do, whatever you want to be.
This is not magic. There’s no mystery to this. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m just presenting the way I see life. I’m curating it the way that I see it, and putting it out there. Now you tell me, by the virtue of the market economy, whether this has a future or not. And I will go on, or not. I don’t claim to know any better. I just claim to see what I see.
[the black apartment]
And you also take action. Many people have visions, but actually figuring out the logistics and getting it to people in a finished form is everything.
I hate to quote Yoda in anything, but as I learned in my youth, “Do or do not. There is no try.” That’s always been a huge thing for me, and it speaks to what you just said. Action is what makes anything valuable.
I used to call this the “bedroom Mozart” syndrome. You can be an extraordinary, extraordinary human being, but if you do not act one day to get it out of your bedroom, nobody will hear your symphonies. And that may be perfectly fine; that may be enough for some people. I, on the other hand, do not claim to have that kind of artistry. But I do want whatever I feel or imagine to be experienced by the largest possible number of people, so that it can have impact.
Woody Allen said, “Don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with somebody I love.” So I can’t knock masturbation. But you can have masturbation AND sex, you know? I don’t think one replaces the other!
So what does The Apartment do, other than masturbate?
We have blossomed into a full-fledged agency that looks at problems which have outdated solutions. I think there’s, to borrow your word, a glut of old ways of looking at things. Old ways to create meaning and old ways to create experiences. That’s where a company like ours comes in. We don’t have the rules ingrained in us. This allows us to take risks where others would never dare to.
Everest would never have been climbed if someone hadn’t said, “Fuck impossible.” You know? Someone said, “I’m doing it. I’m maybe going to die halfway through, but I’m still going to do it.” And I think that comes from a totally naive way of looking at life, which is wonderful. The Apartment has that fearlessness and takes on all kinds of projects, from the branding and marketing for a broadway show to creative-directing the planning of a small eco-city in the Ukraine. We tend to gravitate towards projects that make our lives more interesting, not ones that simply make our company more profitable.
[the black apartment]
Part of being a creative entrepreneur is that it’s not a “job.” It becomes your life. It has to fulfill more than just your bank account.
Precisely. And that kind of business changes in the same way that your life changes. I’m 39. and I’m no longer the person I was when I started The Apartment. I was 28 and idealistic. I started a store, and I had no idea what I was doing. I had never done retail before. I was a filmmaker at NYU, and Gina was a marketing consultant. We decided to do this together. We knew nothing about the rules of retail. We naively just went into it.
What was the concept behind the store?
I came up with the idea of creating a new, theatrical retail concept. Retail needed a new way to exist. Maybe it’s not just crap on shelves with price tags and you go to the cashier, anymore. Maybe there’s something else.
At that time, experiential retail didn’t exist. Prada was starting to think about it. A couple of people were starting to think about it. But nobody had really done it, especially in the design world. Design stores were all either the gadget market or the museum market. There was nothing in-between. We came in and said, “There is something missing. There’s a very large group of people for whom design is about usage, for whom design is about function. For whom design is something you live with, not something you admire.”
The Apartment was literally an apartment. Everything was for sale, but you could come and do whatever you wanted. You could eat. You could take a shower. Everything was there for you. You could stay all day if you wanted, watch TV, whatever. And we started to form a community of people, by the virtue of having a physical space which people came into.
How did that transition into your client work?
Most of what’s happened to us has been organic. There was never a business plan. Very quickly, 9-12 months after we opened the store, people started to come in and say, “Instead of buying individual pieces from your store, can you do this whole thing at my house?” And we thought, “Huh, maybe there’s a business here!” So we hired an interior designer and started doing people’s houses. Getting our first interiors clients was that simple.
And then somebody came and said, “We have a restaurant business. Could you do all the interior design? And since you seem to do your own branding pretty well, could you also do our branding and our marketing?” Hey, absolutely. We did it. Little by little, we saw how big that market was. People who not simply wanted design, but wanted consistent design that was integrated from department to department. From what the place is called to what you hear about it before you go. From what you expect it to feel, look, smell, sound like when you come in, to what you actually get, to how you remember it when you leave.
All of these things are usually taken care of by different people, usually freelancers. Providing continuity became a big thing for us. It became about storytelling. What we were doing, which wasn’t being done by “professionals” in the field, was thinking about life-impact. Thinking about stories, thinking about the things that make us tick on a daily basis: love, sex, entertainment, haircuts… all of the things that make our lives interesting. We saw a gigantic opportunity, so big that we needed to choose between that part of our business and the retail store.
[hello]
Why did you choose the agency?
We saw retail as only ever being able to grow from one store to a chain of stores. That wasn’t all that interesting to us. That was merely scalability. And so we turned into the agency, with no real agenda of what we wanted to do.
We stayed quite open as far as what kind of projects we wanted to take. Interior design was an easy first target, because people saw us as a furniture store. It was easy for people to think, they do furniture, they do interior design, that makes sense. People like to put you in a box. It was an OK box to be in for a while, but I grew quite impatient. I wanted to do stuff on the branding side, and the product side, and music, and movies. So we had to educate our clients as to who we are and what we do. It doesn’t always work. Half the time people don’t know what the fuck to make of us.
But I’m not willing to specialize just to be more “successful.” I am absolutely a generalist. I’m the conductor of a grand orchestra, and the orchestra changes up for every project. The Apartment and I will always be able to see life as a whole and design parts of it, whatever you need for your project. That’s what is interesting to me.
Where do you hope for all this to go?
When I’m designing an apartment or a product or a marketing plan, the number of people who it benefits is finite. So how can I create the environment which will be of the most value to the most people? I know there will never be an end to that quest, but I think it’s interesting to start it.
That’s one of the reasons we created Meet at the Apartment, up the street, with our friends at the Wooster Collective. It’s a way to go beyond theorizing about great ideas, and put them into action. We created that place because we didn’t want to just say we’re about community. We wanted to actually create a community. We made a place where we could meet, where big brands or big manufacturers could meet street designers or graffiti artists. I want to get people together who would otherwise never meet, and see what happens after a day.
Meet at the Apartment is the embodiment of a need to redefine success as something more than financial, something more than fame. What we want to do over there is make something like a sophisticated learning annex. It’s somewhere for us to gather the people that we’ve met on our journey over the past ten years. Whether it’s you guys, or Stefan Sagmeister, or Richard Meier. Take anybody in the world that we find interesting, put them in a room together, give them a subject, talk about it and bring people meaning. And see then how we can institutionalize this and make it valuable.
[meet at the apartment]
What makes New York a special place for that kind of community?
Well, I came from Paris when I was 18 years old. I came here specifically because in Europe, you are nothing if you’ve done nothing, and you are no one if you know no one. You’re completely disrespected because you have no experience. It’s unbelievable to me. Whereas this country, young by definition, can’t afford to disrespect its young. It was built upon the young. So when young people arrive here, as New York has proven again and again and again, we are not just welcomed but taken advantage of in the best possible way.
This country is so full of opportunity. Even today, when a lot of people are seeing dead-ends and desperation. For creative people, I think this recession is an absolute godsend. It’s an opportunity, for once in our lives, to think about subtracting rather than adding. Which is why we’re here today, actually! We got to meet because of this article in the New York Times, speaking of the positive aspects of subtraction. Which I think is extraordinary and shouldn’t be shied away from by anyone, least of all Murray.
It’s a very exciting time right now because everyone’s starting to reflect, as opposed to just going through their usual patterns. When the economy is great, you don’t have to think as much about what you’re doing. The possibilities for change, right now, are huge.
They’re as endless as your imagination. It sounds Disney, but it’s true! It’s kicking us in the ass, but it’s also saying, “What are you actually made of?” It’s not a bad thing to be tested in that way. It’s testing my company as we speak. We are relying on our own power to reinvent ourselves. You need to go through the changes. It’s not enough to continue the line that life gives you. At some point you have to say, “No, even what I started two years ago may not apply to me today.” Maybe there’s something else that I should do, and I have to change. And then I have to change again and again and again.
Now I operate a lot like an octopus, reaching out to talented people all around the world. We have them partner with us on different things, as opposed to relying on people in-house, people who ultimately create unmanageable overhead. And for what? For not much. For an antiquated vision of success which was built by our parents in the ’50s, that the more people you employ, the bigger your office, the more successful you seem?…
When you start your own company, in a lot of ways you refuse the status quo. You refuse to play by the rules, even sometimes by your own rules. As an entrepreneur, you set up your own rules. And you think, “Well those are the best rules anybody can ever set up for me, because they’re mine.” But after a couple years, you look at it again, and you say, “No, that’s bullshit too. Because I’ve evolved.”
[yelo]
Because I was wrong.
Yeah, “I was wrong.” Those are such powerful words, you know? That’s something that I want to be able to say every day. In order to reconfigure. This company is a different company than it was six months ago, for the better.