By Lana Zellner

Stephan Jaklitsch has been the sole architect for Marc Jacobs International. In the ten years since his firm opened, he’s built an impressive 100+ projects all over the world. He also recently published a monograph with ORO Editions which is receiving great reviews. Stephan’s work is modern yet warm. He is best known from the balanced yet unexpected mix of materials used in his work. http://sjaklitsch.com

When you started your company, what was the transition like from being an employee to being self employed?

In some ways it is not that different. I think everyone has this view of an architect as a single person deciding things. But it’s a team of people working together, working with the client, trying to solve problems.

When you start your own practice, there is also the issue of finding your own voice and taking the time to explore the issues that you yourself are interested in. In that sense, it is very interesting and, for me, it was a good challenge.

What were your early projects like?

My first solo project was for a hedge fund in Manhattan – designing their offices and trading floor. It was a great challenge. The project was located in a neo-gothic townhouse off of Madison Avenue, so the design was very much about respecting the spirit of the existing building.

Some of the other projects were apartment and town house renovations. One of my first fashion projects was a small showroom for Danilo Dolci, which is in my new book. The design had to adapt to three different brands simultaneously, which was a challenge. Shortly after, we were asked to work on our first Marc Jacobs store.

Oh, so right from the beginning of your career you have been involved with very high end designers like Marc Jacobs?

We started doing Robert Duffy’s apartment in June of 1999 and then by the fall of that year we began working on the San Francisco store.

And how did you get to this point? Were you with a team of people or was it just you as a sole proprietor?

In the beginning it was just me, working out of my studio apartment. Within a year, we grew to three people – all working out of my studio. We moved to our current office on 27th Street in February of 2000. I remember it being a very liberating thing to finally have that separation. We started out with just two little offices on the 9th floor. As the business grew, we started taking over more and more of the floor. About a year ago we took over the entire floor.

That’s great! Do you feel that there is a connection between your design work and that of Robert Duffy and Marc Jacobs? There has to be an interesting relationship between the architect and the client when the client is also a designer. I would imagine you have to be very in tune with their design sense, would you say that’s true?

Yes and no, it’s not really an easy, one-to-one thing. There are things about Marc Jacobs clothing that make them special – things that maybe only the person wearing the clothes would know. Like a simple thermal T-shirt made out of cashmere. They take ordinary things and transform them, using refined materials or tailoring to make them special.

Marc and Robert didn’t even have a sign on their offices, and the sign on their first few stores were only about two inches high – which is still true of New York’s Bleecker & Mercer Street stores and the San Francisco store. So, their aesthetic was very quiet, and subdued. I think, if you look at our work, you first see one broad stroke, and then as you look more and more into the details you begin to see the complexity in the work. And in that spirit there is definitely a connection.

And, why do you consider the details and texture to be so important to your work?

I think architecture has to work at the large scale, the medium scale, and the foreground. It has to work from across the city, as well as being up close. I think the closer you get, the more information you may begin to process. For each project, we always try to play with details and explore different materials and textures. But there is always a thematic core that runs through each of our projects, which connects the materials we choose.

Is there a specific approach that your firm takes to design?

Well, it’s one approach for a residential project and another for a commercial project. Though, there is a certain theatricality that links the two. For a commercial project, I ask the client what they want the customer to really experience as they cross the threshold. Do they want surprise? There’s a sort of psychological component to it. Do they want calm or do they want excitement? It changes for each brand and client. From that conversation, a certain mood that is set, and then we go onto manipulating lighting, scale, proportion and materiality to reflect what the client is looking for.

Speaking of scale, you have recently been expanding into product design as well as urban scaled projects. How is that going?

How IS that going? It is definitely a process! We are currently developing some houseware products. We are exploring a number of different themes; some of them are directly related to structures we find in nature. That’s really about all I can say about it right now, it is still very much in progress.

We’re always open to doing other things though. I was trained as an architect and there has always been this sort of dichotomy between interior architecture and architecture, which I view as false. I am sort of surprised by the profession actually, and how they view that division. But, being trained as an architect makes you believe that you should be able to design anything from a soup spoon to a city. It’s a natural sort of progression. Most architects get smaller projects early on and as they mature and gain more responsibility the clients become more willing to trust them.

There is always this problem, I think, with clients who think you can only do a project if you’ve done one before. We’ve worked with clients who have asked us to do things because they like to work with us and they respect our attitude, even though we may not have done that project type before. We actually just finished our first restaurant in Milan which is a new typology for us. I had never done a retail store before working with Marc Jacobs and I had never done a trading floor before working on the hedge fund’s office.

No better way to get experience than to dive right in!

Well, there is a passion that you should invest in what you’re doing. As long as you’re willing to learn and you’re willing to put a certain amount of energy into it, I think that a smart client recognizes that they are probably going to get a better project as a result of you putting in that extra effort.

What advice do you give to young architects today that are looking to dive in and start their own firm?

Well, it’s really not a bad time. Actually, a downturn can be a really great time to start, if your overhead is low and you’re willing to take risk. It can be a great time because you’ll grow as the market recovers. It takes time for people to know what you’re doing, where and how to seek you out, and help you realize a project. But, I think it’s also a matter of remaining true to what you really believe in. We take an academic approach and we treat design very seriously. We have never lost that. That’s what we do, and I don’t think that will ever change here.

See more at http://sjaklitsch.com