When you look down into the monumental Art Nouveau atrium of Paris‘ La Samaritaine shopping landmark or gaze at the Tokyo skyline from the inside of the towering Aman Residences, it’s hard to believe Yabu Pushelberg’s first real gig was a dry cleaning depot in their native Toronto.
“We’re 45 years vintage this month. We started when we were 2,” designer Glenn Pushelberg jokes. Never short of an epic story and full of impromptu quips, Pushelberg and his partner in life and work George Yabu burst into a fit of hearty laughter at the notion they could very well go down in history as the two random Canadians that took the New York City fashion retail scene, and the world for that matter, by storm.
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“I don’t know how the hell we did it,” says Yabu, incredulously looking back at the past five decades. Pushelberg chimes in, saying he doesn’t want to brag, but he says he thinks they took over Italy with their furniture and lighting designs for reputable brands like Molteni&C, Salvatori, Henge and GlasItalia.
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Their multidisciplinary design firm Yabu Pushelberg, based in Toronto and New York, has made a name for itself among retailers, hotels, restaurants, furniture and home decor brands for its commitment to solving problems in creative ways, conjuring nature’s calming effects and conveying a sense of longevity and emotion with every sinuous curve and ray of complimentary lighting.
They originally splashed onto the global design scene at the turn of the Millennium with a revamp of Bergdorf Goodman‘s lower level cosmetics floor in the late ’90s, when basement-level shopping was a raw concept.
Their calming, futuristic aesthetic then caught the eye of designer Carolina Herrera, who invited them to her house and told them “feel who I am as a person and then design me a store.” Tiffany & Co. followed, and Yabu Pushelberg’s 2015 revamp of Lane Crawford in China brought the store from mundane to exciting. Through rough sketches alone, its owners, the Woo family, were able to convince major luxury brands to participate in the store’s reinvention and the rest is history.
Christine Nakaoka, who brought the firm to New York for the Bergdorf’s project, called the duo “incredibly imaginative and detail-oriented designers and often came up with better ideas than we had thought of,” in a 2002 interview with The New York Times.
Today, even with the influx of online shopping, Yabu Pushelberg still feels they have innovative designs for IRL shopping.
“I look at aspirational brands like J.Crew. There’s an opportunity there to make a story… the physical environment needs to catch up [to the fashion vision],” Pushelberg says (adding that they are up for the job).
It’s no surprise that the duo was sought out by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton in 2020 to redesign La Samaritaine during the COVID-19 pandemic — a project that represented the first glimpse into retail’s post-pandemic future, creating an all new immersive shopping experience that can only happen in person. Through the eyes of what they refer to as “the Flâneur,” they modernized its atrium with romantically lit glass fixtures in an abstract, geometric array.
After meeting at Canada’s Ryerson University in 1972, Yabu and Pushelberg founded their firm in 1980. Early on, they redesigned a shoe store in a Toronto mall where one of them had a summer job. They don’t turn their nose up at having done the dry cleaning depot either. “We expressed ourselves by doing something custom and by doing an iron rod and we also designed this fancy hook. We’ve always had a passion for everything,” Yabu reflects on the distant memory, inferring that the duo have just the same amount of fun revamping a mom- and -pop business as they do a five-star hotel.
Another huge turning point was in 1984 when “this fellow,” Club Monaco cofounder Alfred Sung, came to them about his new concept for basics, Pushelberg says. That year, they designed their first Club Monaco in Toronto, hiring artists from France to paint murals on the wall, and outfitted it with a boxing ring in the center with a mannequin display. “When you are babies you have all this unbridled energy and it was a great time for us, and from that people realized that we actually understood retail and we understood fashion,” Yabu muses.
Eventually the restaurants and the hotels came calling. By 1998, Yabu Pushelberg won the James Beard Award for Toronto’s Monsoon Restaurant, which piqued the interest of Barry Sternlicht of Starwood Capital Group. This led to the design of two unique hotels, the 500-room W Hotel New York flagship and the 57-room Four Seasons Marunouchi, Tokyo.
“We always wanted to do hotels. We won the James Beard Award, which we didn’t really know how special that was. We went to New York and there was this big ceremony, and of course we were late and we open the door to the auditorium and there’s Martha Stewart on stage,” Pushelberg says, throwing up his hands.
During Salone del Mobile.Milano, it’s 3 p.m. at the Magna Pars hotel in Milan’s design district and Pushelberg and Yabu are fashionably late. At about half past, they burst into the restaurant, both wearing two complementary shades of blue and enthusing about the booth installation, a series of vignettes illustrating the poetry of water in all its forms, designed for Kohler. During the broader design season they debuted 18 new products, including an abstractly sculpted stone kitchen for Eggersmann, a German kitchen maker, and the Sway modular sofa system to Molteni&C’s most recent outdoor collection. “You get instant gratification designing a chair,” Yabu notes, adding that their furniture design work is also a major facet of their business and an enjoyable one at that.
On a call between Milan and New York City, they regretfully recognize summer has come to an end and they just left their summer house in Montauk, N.Y., where they enjoyed a season of whale watching and intimate dinners with friends and family. A fresh season of newness is about to commence with projects and travel on the horizon to destination cities like Tokyo, Copenhagen, London and Barcelona.
After 45 years together, they are more concerned about well-being than profits. “You know, I find it interesting reflecting back on how we got here some days. But we are at a point now where we are trying to use our mental resources to enact a more giving approach,” Pushelberg says.
One project is for Friends of Ruby, a transitional home in Toronto for gay, lesbian, transgender and aboriginal at-risk teenagers, where they employed their experience at micro hotels, such as the Moxy. They have also lent their support to the Art Gallery in Ontario, donating to support “Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear,” the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work to date.
“It’s never been about building a business and making money. And since we never really worked for any other design firms, we got out of school and invented ourselves. We had no rules. Whether it was a fast food restaurant at the beginning or whether it was a dry clean depot… our combo of hard work, our personalities and our passion shine through always,” Pushelberg says, calling for Yabu to come sit next to him. Their future, they say, will be marked by exploring unexpected avenues.
“We want our legacy to be that we lived our lives giving people examples to lead fearlessly, limitless lives filled with passion, joy and care. You don’t need to be as ambitious but live the best life you can,” Yabu adds.
As for surviving 45 years working and living with your life partner without “killing each other,” they say the secret is about staying steadfastly on the journey, Pushelberg suggests.
“Like any relationship… sometimes it’s a great ride… sometimes it’s a bumpy ride. But you know, we believe in each other and we work on the ride. We care enough for each other that we continue to work at it.”