Outside the box
Unlike most architects, the duo behind the phenomenally successful Paris-based Studio KO love being told what to do.
Limitations are not generally something architects like to deal with. Whether it’s restrictions on budget, design concept or building height, they usually prefer to convince their clients, local councils, neighbours, planning authorities, and anyone else who questions their wisdom, that they know best. To paraphrase Philip Johnson, an architect without arrogance is not an architect.
Architectural duo Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty, founders of the Paris-based firm Studio KO, are a rare exception to Johnson’s rule. Rather than egotistical, the adjectives people most commonly use to describe them are humble, collaborative and deferential. In 2017 they designed the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Marrakech for Pierre Bergé, who wrote in the foreword to their book, published by Rizzoli in the same year, that a key to their unpretentious nature is that they chose to highlight their first names in their company acronym rather than their surnames.
The pair, who met at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1996, are partners in life as well as business and founded their practice in 2000. In two decades they have achieved a level of success that, given the time involved in completing building works, often takes an architect an entire career to attain. Studio KO has designed a series of extraordinary homes around the world, as well as hotels and resorts, bars and restaurants, luxury boutiques and even museums – the Holy Grail of architecture. It has offices in Paris and Morocco (and for a period of time in London), and a staff of 60, with more than 20 projects on the drawing board at any given time.
The duo’s self-effacement might also be one of the reasons they have attracted some serious alpha clients. As well as Bergé, those for whom they have designed houses include Marella Agnelli, the late widow of Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli; Patrick Guerrand-Hermès, of that Hermès family; and Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabor Al Thani, a former prime minister of Qatar. They designed the Chiltern Firehouse in London for hotelier André Balazs, of Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles fame. Current projects include hotels in Portugal, France and Vietnam, as well as a museum in Arles, France, and another museum assignment in Marrakech for the Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent.
Despite the roll call of A-list clients with deep pockets – the sort of people who rarely impose strict budgets on building works – being given free rein on a project is not something Studio KO relishes. In part, according to Fournier, because their work doesn’t have an easily identifiable signature look like, say, that of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid or Tadao Ando. “There is nothing we find more terrifying than the client who says ‘do whatever you like’,” says Fournier. “We like to have a dialogue with our clients, a combining of our taste with theirs. A style imposed from on high isn’t interesting for us.”
It’s also in part because they find it easier to work within limitations. “We love constraints,” says Fournier. “I think when you have your own style it’s okay to be given carte blanche because you are used to doing what you often do and it’s what you’re known for. But for us it’s really difficult, because the projects we like doing are the ones where they have been created with a lot of constraints by the client.”
One such client was the Australian-born, Los Angeles-based advertising creative Richard Christiansen, who commissioned Studio KO to design his house, Flamingo Estate at Eagle Rock in Los Angeles, after working with them on a project for the hotelier André Balazs. The house was featured in WISH in May last year.
When Christiansen first met with Fournier and Marty at his house he was armed with some material, recalls Fournier. “He arrived with a whole lot of images and references. He is very well travelled and well read, so he has many very strong ideas. Richard is really unique, and it would be difficult for us to impose our own predetermined style on him because you have to deal with him and his taste and his background, and so many things. It’s a private home so it’s a kind of portrait of him, it’s not a portrait of us. A house has to be a portrait of the owner, not a portrait of an architect.”
When a client doesn’t actually know what they want it creates a degree of anxiety for Studio KO – as well as hard work. “Sometimes there is a tendency to think that a project would be better without any constraints, but in a way they help to give you direction,” says Fournier.
“You can transform the constraints into opportunities. When clients have no idea of what they want it’s really difficult, because you have to imagine the project from your own point of view but you also have to imagine it from their point of view, so you have to work double.”
While Studio KO doesn’t have a singular style, its work, particularly when it comes to private houses, favours simple materials such as coarsely cut stone walls, rammed earth, off-form concrete and rough-hewn timber. “We don’t like sleek,” says Marty. “We prefer things that show they’ve been crafted by someone’s hands.”
Their houses eschew grand architectural gestures and fashionable interior design statements. They have designed several in Morocco for clients, and while they are rooted in the history, culture and materials of the place, they are nevertheless meticulously modern. The pair favour solid, opaque construction that adds an air of mystery to their buildings.
A global roster of clients means Marty and Fournier spend a significant amount of time apart, yet they insist they are both intimately involved in every project and design them together in a method they developed out of necessity, which also gives their work a conceptual framework. Fournier starts by writing what he says is his vision for the project and collects reference images. “We work together but we work differently,” he says. “Sometimes it might just be that I have an idea of the texture of the walls, so I send Olivier images that I have found wherever he is in the world. Sometimes I make a little drawing and I send that. Then he sends back other references and drawings and we go back and forth, each adding ingredients like a recipe.”
When they are both happy with their preliminary sketches, they show them to a project manager in their team. “They will add things because our sense is to be really open to the team,” says Fournier. “All ideas are on the table, it’s not only Olivier and me. The idea can even come from an intern – it’s completely open. It’s a complicated process because it’s like a shorthand conversation between Olivier and me and we are not always together, so sometimes it’s not easy for the team to follow.”
When it comes to residential work, however, the pair like to be in the same place at the same time. “The process is different for houses because we like to stay onsite for a night so we are both together at the same time and at the same place – we used to do that when we were younger, where we stay in a tent just to see in the morning where the sun arrives and where it is all day long.”
Marty and Fournier have worked this way ever since they met as students. Even when it came to their graduating project, they took the unorthodox step of submitting a collaborative effort. But despite their closeness, insists Fournier, they have very different ways of working. Fournier describes Marty as a “soldier” when it comes to his work ethic and himself as having been something of a slacker in his student days. “I was a big fan of movies and I think I spent more time in the cinema during this period than in school,” he says. “That’s why I think I am so bad at drawing things.” Fournier wasn’t to know it but the hours he spent watching movies would have a profound influence on his architectural work. “I don’t know why exactly, but inspiration from cinema is really important in our work,” he says. “It might be because in the beginning with a project we have to write a scenario, a sort of story, like a movie.” This is especially the case for non-residential projects, the pair say, where there is less sense of a portrait of a client that needs to be painted.
“I’ve always been interested in what is behind the story,” Fournier says. “What you have in movies really is at least on two levels – the first level with the story, what you see and hear and what you have in the foreground, and then the background is everything like the landscape and the house and the décor. For example, in the fabulous movie Call Me By Your Name, you know the importance of the house in this movie; it’s the best illustration of what I am trying to say. Or the film by Jean-Luc Godard, Le Mépris (Contempt), and the importance of this house. I mean, it’s not the same movie if you have a different house. I don’t know why but since I was a kid, I always looked behind the story and the dialogue and the movie itself – I just wanted to see what is the décor, and I think it can be really important for the story and it can carry the whole thing. And in our life it’s the same.”
The houses Studio KO has designed for diverse clients have one thing in common: they could easily be sets for a movie about extraordinary characters who live in rarefied, impossibly beautiful surroundings. It’s therefore no surprise that their early success came from client referrals – birds of a feather etcetera. According to the architecture writer Tom Delavan, while the pair were on holiday in Morocco shortly after graduating from university, they bumped into their friend Pascale Mussard, a creative director at Hermès and a descendant of the company’s founder, Thierry Hermès. She introduced them to her uncle, Patrick Geurrand-Hermès, who was looking for an architect to design him a home near Tangiers.
It was Geurrand-Hermès who provided Fournier and Marty an entrée into the lives of the fabulously wealthy international citizens of North Africa, an opportunity that eventually resulted in a series of spectacular house designs. A meeting with Marella Agnelli led to the two introducing her to Geurrand-Hermès and her eventual purchase of his house – which Studio KO was subsequently commissioned to renovate in collaboration with the architect Gae Aulenti. Before long they were introduced to longtime Marrakech resident Pierre Bergé, the former lover and business partner of Yves Saint Laurent, and that led to what would ultimately be their most celebrated commission to date – the Musée Yves Saint Laurent, which graces the cover of their first book.
It’s a dizzying level of success in just 20 years in a field that often sees practitioners not hit their stride until much later in life. The couple now have a young child and, says Fournier, it has led them to the realisation that their company is at a crossroads.
“Now is the maximum of what we can do if we want to keep an eye on every project at every stage,” he says. “The bigger we get, we can’t be on top of everything and it [the business] becomes something else – you spend more time in meetings and less time on what is really your job: creating projects and spending time with the team explaining your ideas.”
“An international business is something that happened organically because of the people we met in Morocco who were from all over the world,” says Fournier. “We didn’t make it that way on purpose.” He says he admires the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, who is known as an uncompromising minimalist, has a very small practice and rarely works outside Switzerland. He also appreciates the life and career of the French architect Mark Held, who used to have a big practice in Paris and gave it all up for a simple life on a Greek island. “He only does houses on that island, not even all over Greece,” says Fournier. “And one a year, not more. One to design and one in the building phase.” It’s fabulous and it’s kind of a dream.”
Inside Coco Chanel’s newly renovated Riviera escape villa La Pausa
Everyone from Salvador Dalí to the Duke of Westminster has stayed at the Cote D’Azur gem, which Chanel has bought back and restored to its former glory.
We’re in the new gilded age of the boom boom billionaire
The tectonic plates of generational wealth are shifting and whether its proponents are bold and brash or stealth and sophisticated, there is a whole lot of money on the move.