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Word-of-mouth from superstar actors and super-cool artists has put the global studio into the loop of iconoclastic hospitality clients.
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By Mary Scoviak
Just entering its second decade, Graft doesn’t need to allocate much time to sending out RFPs. Even in this downturn, the ripple effect of patronage by Hollywood celebrities such as Brad Pitt and Will Smith and cultural scions like art critic/curator David Hickey, installation artist Jennifer Steinkamp and Robert Sain, director of LACMA Lab, Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s research and development unit, keeps phones ringing and in-boxes full at the firm’s offices in Los Angeles, Berlin and Beijing. Who Graft knows has opened doors only the in-crowd can access. But it’s what this architecture/ interior design studio understands about involving clients as collaborators and giving them the biggest bang for their budget that’s grown its portfolio in good times and bad.
Founders Lars Krückeberg, Wolfram Putz and Thomas Willemeit weren’t thinking about rubbing shoulders with Hollywood stars when they moved from their native Germany to the U.S. in 1995. Steeped in Bauhaus at the Technical University of Braunschweig’s Architecture Institute, the trio had become as disenchanted with notions about prescribed function as they were with European traditionalism. Their mutual hunger for a new approach drew Krückeberg and Putz to post-graduate work at the Southern California School of Architecture. A few months after completing their studies in mid-1998, Krückeberg and Putz brought in Willemeit and launched Graft Lab (the “Lab” has been dropped). A fourth friend and UCLA-post graduate alum, Christoph Korner, joined the new studio as a project partner.
Working for anyone else was out of the question, says Korner. “Lars, Wolfram and Thomas wanted to realize their own ideas in architecture and related fields. That really guided them toward an independent practice. They had incredible vision and they also had incredible drive,” he adds.
Networking was a big part of the business plan—not the Gen X version that only invites in people who can directly help your career, but a more bohemian template in which like-minded people from all walks of life inspire and inform each other. The designers took on whatever projects gave them elbow room to test their view of space as a continuous form rather than compartmentalized units.
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