When Sotheby’s New York reopened in Manhattan’s landmark Breuer building this fall, it brought along the unique dynamics of a bustling auction house. Sales come and go, and with them masterworks of every style, size, medium, and era. Those rhythms all presented an exciting opportunity, creatively and entrepreneurially, for Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch, cofounders of the AD100 firm Roman and Williams. After collaborating with Sotheby’s on a 2024 installation of Impressionism, for which they were tasked with subverting assumptions of the movement, the duo are now conceiving the company’s new restaurant, Marcel, named after the architect. Designed and operated by Roman and Williams, the project opens this spring.
“Breuer’s geometries, you can’t get them out of your head,” says Standefer, speaking at their downtown office, surrounded by sketches, renderings, and other hints at what’s to come. The power of his Brutalism, she explains, lies not only in the beauty of faceted forms, but in the poetry of underlying tensions—between light and shadow, breath and heft. “The building is like a fortress, intense and intimidating,” says Alesch. “Yet there is a softness too. It’s important to build upon that heart.” The couple’s design, as of yet under wraps, resolves to respect and engage with that legacy. Adds Standefer, “We want to find our own language.”
Breuer’s walnut-and-bronze stair railing crystallized the restaurant’s palette, giving way to millwork in two types of the wood—Claro and Black Figured—and burnished planes of metal. It’s one of the many pas de deux that will unfold: in the dialogue between tufted banquettes and bush-hammered concrete walls, for instance, or between the tubular steel frames and leather upholstery of Bauhaus stools. “We are taking Breuer’s touchstones,” Standefer says, “and making sure to pair them with something unexpected.”
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