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: NOW PLAYING :: ARRAY :: Conspicuous consumption Restaurants made his reputation, but they’re not all that’s on the menu for Adam Tihany With a resume that glitters with luxurious nightclubs and hotel projects, not to mention the signature bistros that are the cornerstone of his reputation, Adam Tihany is among the most accomplished of contemporary designers. But the word “design” fails to encompass how he interacts with his international clientele. Given the intense one-on-one relationships he forms with each one, first extracting, then realizing, the concepts that play in their mind’s eye, Tihany is almost a psychologist. “Almost?” he says, with a slight variation in his voice akin to a raised eyebrow. “It’s difficult to get people to talk about themselves without their trying to cover up. My clients and I set out on a journey to transfer their visions into wood, glass, and metal, by first creating a storyboard, just like in a movie, and then by accumulating details that arrive at a portrait of that person.” Tihany’s “portraits” are available for viewing throughout New York, his home base since 1976, and in cities ranging from London and Boston to Budapest and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. But don’t forget to check if a reservation is required before trying to view them. In his gallery are an eclectic mix of blue-chip restaurants that fully reflect the intents of their proprietors, from Sirio Maccioni’s carnivalesque Le Cirque 2000 and the relaxed elegance of Jean-George Vongerichten’s Jean Georges, four-star favorites opened in 1997 in Manhattan; the elemental, fire-and-water atmosphere of Charlie Trotter’s C and Agua venues at the recently revamped One & Only Palmilla resort in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico; and Charlie Palmer’s Aureole, with its coolly dominating Wine Tower and airborne stewards, at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. Per Se, his latest collaboration with chef Thomas Keller, is one of the already famed “fourth-floor restaurants” overlooking Central Park from the new Time Warner Center. Anyone looking to find traces of Tihany at the lavish, yet tranquil, Per Se will come away disappointed. His projects are all about their owners. “Thomas and I have been friends for a long time, since his Bouchon and French Laundry restaurants in Napa Valley. In designing Per Se, I had to inquire: who is Thomas, where does he come from, and where does he want to go? He’s a very private person, a total, passionate perfectionist, not easy to get close to. Per Se is an urban version of his brand of hospitality, not just French Laundry in the city. It was a two-year process, mostly in his kitchen, learning how he thinks and what he puts into his food. I really suffered,” laughs Tihany, a gastronome and, as it happens, a restaurateur himself. Tihany uses his own Venetian cuisine restaurants, Remi in New York (opened in 1987) and Los Angeles, as “laboratories” to educate himself and his 12-person staff in Manhattan on the subtleties of the hospitality market. Owning a restaurant, with its myriad pressures (“people still call me ‘Mr. Remi,’ as I was the maitre d’ for three years till we could afford to hire one”), assists his design diagnoses. “What emerged with Per Se was a complex study of Thomas as a person, which then had to be translated into a new building in New York City. The end result is a beautiful and very subtle portrait of Thomas Keller.” Last year, Tihany added an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the New York School of Interior Design to his list of commendations. He founded Tihany Design in 1978, and with one niggling exception is optimistic about the state of the local restaurant industry post 9-11. “Le Cirque [which he will revamp once it finds its new home outside the Palace Hotel] is no different than Per Se, in that both are accurate portraits of their owners. The economy has changed. But New York is extremely resilient, and what’s happened post-9-11 did not erase the need to have three- and four-star restaurants,” he says. “It just erased the smoking, which is very sad.” Array contacted the designer as he was reviewing an advance copy of his new book, Tihany Style: Hospitality Design (published by Mondadori Electa). In the book, he lets others, like Keller, try to pin down his indefinable style. [Keller labels him “a chameleon… he helps lead you to those right choices without losing sight of your overall vision.”] Catching him in New York is something of a rarity; he spent the summer renovating his home, rather than relentlessly racking up frequent flyer miles, as he does six months out of the year, visiting clients. His background as a super-traveled, self-described “international bastard”—born in Transylvania in 1948, raised in Jerusalem, schooled in architecture at the Politecnico di Milano in Italy—can be considered a component of his style, as it helps him bridge cultures. “If you are an observant person and curious, you can learn something everywhere. The world is design,” Tihany says. It also gives him practical insights. “I’m not an hotelier, but, having slept in more hotel rooms than anyone, I know what it takes to please a tired traveler who checks into his room at 10 p.m.” The “heaven and hell” concept (never “theme”—“there may be a theme to my work, but it won’t be right in your face and it’s up to you to discover”) of Aleph, a new Tihany-designed hotel in Rome with a divinely inspired spa and a Sin restaurant, is destined to keep visitors alert. Likewise, his experience with airports helped him with his first major architectural commission, a private airplane hangar in Scottsdale, Ariz., that opened last year with Tihany’s whimsical appointments, including wing-like garages. “It was pressure-filled, as it was my first architectural design experience, but also joyous,” he says. “And it always helps to have a Medici who is willing to bring it off the page and into reality.” Las Vegas is full of Medicis who let Tihany express themselves. Teatro, at the MGM Grand, is the designer at his swankiest; it’s a large pod that opens at night to reveal a club with the seductive chic of a red Ferrari. He’s most thrilled, though, about Cravings, at the Mirage, which represents a “democratization of my design,” via an upgrade to—of all things—the lowly Las Vegas buffet, far from Per Se or his seven fine-dining establishments in Sin City. “Cravings is the last bastion of traditional Vegas food-and-beverage service that has never been profoundly altered,” Tihany explains. “The celebrity chefs, the high-power restaurants, themed places; it’s all the best you can see anywhere. The prevailing attitude with the all-you-can-eat buffet has always been ‘if you build it, they will come,’ no matter how dingy. When the president of the Mirage called me and said, ‘I really think it’s about time to revisit our buffet,’ I thought it was the most exciting phone call I received in years. It was like someone telling me that the flag had to be redesigned. I said, ‘I’m already on my way to the airport. Don’t move.’ Finally, I’m doing something that’s not exclusive. I love four-star restaurants but they’re intimidating to many people. Cravings [which consists of 11 freestanding food stations and a full-service bar] serves 5,000-6,000 meals a day, and there are two-hour waits to get in. Now every Vegas hotel is engaging big-name designers to redo their buffets.” At work, Tihany isn’t afraid to leave the trendsetting to others. His offices (Tihany Design also maintains a four-person staff in Rome) are run “on enthusiasm. So I can guarantee you that if on the same day a big rotating rooftop restaurant in Shanghai and a little wine store in Mexico City come in, I’m going to take the lead designing the wine store. I always get the projects that are unspoken for, but that’s okay; they’re fun, and equally important to me. I don’t have feathers that I need to fluff all the time.” The designer says he “snoops around” his colleagues’ desks from 7-9 a.m., examining their progress, then spends the rest of the day “firefighting” challenges and tinkering with the product lines he’s involved with. These have included a collection of contemporary Judaica for the Jewish Museum (“which impressed my mother a lot more than the airplane hangar”); K + T Holloware co-designed with Keller; and barware, including iconic cocktail glasses and a forthcoming shaker, with Christofle. “Each project, big and small, starts with a spark,” says Tihany, who puts products and people through a similar analytical process. “When you shake that cocktail, I want to communicate something to you”—which communicates something about the sophistication and intimacy of that elusive Tihany style.