When he designs luxury condo buildings in New York City, Miami and elsewhere, Paul Whalen aims for emotions.
“We want them to feel it in their gut,” said Whalen, a partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects.
The firm’s recent projects in South Florida include the St. Regis Residences in Miami, The Shore Club in Miami Beach, and South Flagler House in West Palm Beach.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Commercial Observer: South Florida is experiencing a boom in luxury residential development. How have projects changed over the past 10 or 15 or 20 years?
Paul Whalen: The clients are knowledgeable. Quality is much better. People are spending money on these buildings, so it gives us a better opportunity to do a nice building.
Apartments are bigger. I think we are living through this golden age for multifamily housing that we haven’t seen since before World War II. It’s really interesting how long it took for things to come back to the point where they were in the 1930s. Really good-quality, multifamily buildings are being built. And I feel so lucky to be able to be part of it because it’s just timing.
We’re sort of very aware of how lucky we are to be in a position to build buildings that we love doing, and to improve cities like New York or Miami. We always think of these buildings as sort of being fragments of the city, too. They’re not just buildings, but they’re part of cities, and we love cities and neighborhoods. And that’s what we get to do.
Why do you say it’s a golden age?
One of the big ways it’s showing up is that residential buildings are making news. It used to be just office buildings that made news, or museums. Now residential buildings are making news in the world of architecture. And developers are hiring really high-profile architects to do their buildings.
That’s one of the big ways that you can see that it’s a kind of golden age. They’re going for the best architects that they can buy in a way that they didn’t and couldn’t in the 1960s, `70s, `80s. There was very little residential done by top architects in those days. When Richard Meier did two buildings on the West Side Highway in New York in the late 1990s, that was big news.
Is your firm’s brand part of the reason that luxury consumers are buying units in buildings?
Yeah, which is nice for us. Nice. I mean, any architect that has a reputation, it’s a nice thing to have.
We are very much a brand. Sometimes developers will come to us and wonder, “Well, should I do RAMSA, or should I do branded residential?” They think RAMSA is going to cost extra, and branded residences are going to cost extra. There are some markets where they decide it’s going to be one or the other.
St. Regis here in Miami is both. But they think of us as certainly a contender for what’s going to raise their values.
What sort of amenities are developers asking you to put into these new towers?
The porte-cochère is a huge deal — the ability to drop off your luggage and your kids and not be on the street. People live in New York often because they do love the streets of New York. You want to see people on the streets on the sidewalks and see what they’re wearing and it’s very social.
But there are certain times when you actually don’t want to be a part of that, like when you’re unloading your car.
A big change in New York right now is that more developers are putting the amenities above ground. We’ve done two buildings now with pools above ground, and the gymnasium is above ground. And that is partially because they’re able to do it and not count as your area, above ground. But it’s still expensive to put a pool in a gym above ground, rather than sticking it in the basement.
But when they can get the break from counting it as floor area above ground, it makes the developer much more likely to spend the money on it. And then that raises the quality of life.
One of the ways that amenities can be great is that no matter what apartment you’re in, you get to go to that pool or to that gym and get a great view.
What’s your biggest challenge?
One really hard thing is maintaining the quality that we anticipate every step of the way. Every building has a budget, and there’s certain things that turn out to be expensive, and then just getting over that and still getting what you want by dealing with what they call value engineering.
It’s very important to us that we have very clear communication with the developer, because what we don’t want to have happen is have something come up at the last minute, and they say, “Oh, I can’t afford this.” And then you end up with a bad solution because the project doesn’t have time to do anything else.
Whereas if you find out earlier, then we can design around it. What we want to do is work with the developer. There’s some things that we may not mind getting rid of, and there are other things that we find important. Overall, we’ve had really good luck with it, but we’re careful with it, and we have great clients, and they’re careful as well.
Another thing is keeping energy up on a team, keeping them excited about the work. That’s something I think about a lot, maintaining high energy. As firms go to second and third generations, I think that’s a really important thing to do.
And not everybody accomplishes it. Pushing a team to quality every step of the way is something that’s important.
That’s one thing about having a good reputation — that reputation is based on something and you can’t disappoint. There’s, I guess, nervousness about quality. Keeping people excited about our buildings is something that I think about a lot. But it’s not a terror. It’s actually really exciting.
Jeff Ostrowski can be reached at jostrowski@commercialobserver.com.
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