
Côme Ménage founded his practice, Re-A.D, in 2017 in historic Brooklyn, New York, bringing his French background and his international perspective to his adopted home town. He and his practice are dedicated to the conception and realization of architectural and cultural interventions that revitalize historic structures and neighborhoods.
Côme has been recently honored with the Chicago Athenaeum and the European Centre for Architecture’s prestigious “Europe 40 under 40®” Architecture and Design Award for 2022-2023.
As a kid, what did you answer when asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
I wanted to be an Astrophysician. I loved the stories about starts, solar system, galaxies, supernovas, black holes. It’s technical and there is something about the scale of them that cannot be comprehended. I love to understand systems.
Which designer and/or piece of work inspires you? Why?
Junya Ishigami is one designer/ architect that strikes me those days with projects that are strong, uncluttered but the spaces seem to act as a stage for everyday life and interactions. It speaks about design and nature. You don’t have to read the description to understand what he meant. It looks like the projects are meant to be experienced in person even if they also photograph really well.
How would you describe your design philosophy?
My firm is called Re-AD, for Reuse-Adaptability. We just say ‘read’, as read a book in the office, because the approach is really to look, take in, understand the current narrative. It leads to keeping and renovating, or restoring in the case of historic structures, but also reinventing them. I love that the kind of project we undertake allows me to research history, sometimes geography, but also leads to weave in the next leg of the story through architecture and design.
The projects sometimes shows workarounds to existing quirky conditions, similarly to a quality that you can find in buildings and interiors that have evolved over time. I do not necessarily have a specific style in mind. I try to not overdesign every part of a project. The main philosophy is to not have a pre-conceived idea of what the result should look like and let the exploration and process do its job. The goal of it all is to create spaces that people can easily appropriate themselves and in which they can feel at ease.
Who are the three designers you follow on Instagram?
@studioanneholtrop
@_airesmateus
@jeanjacquesbalzac
Give us some context about where you live: How long you’ve been there and how does it influence your work?
I moved to the US from France when I was in my early 20s. I had this idea of New York being this perfect, superior organized city while it’s actually the rich experience of having every possibility open, all the time and the dizziness that comes with it that made me stay. At the end, shooting for perfection in our projects here is often backfiring due so many factors and people from different cultures working on the same project. So we focus on what works and we move forward. The pace is rapid, the prices to build something high. There is as much strategy, admin and HR than design that goes into our projects so they can exist.
Was there a moment when you realized you wanted to be a designer? If so, what was it?
I started college as a Medicine major. I really liked to understand how physical things, people, bodies function. I liked the complexity and the importance of the field but also felt that as a designer and architect you can understand, fix but also, what felt what was missing in the medical field: reconfigure. This is still the aspect of design that I love the most: modify a narrative, create a canvas that will act as the new backdrop for someone’s life. There is this moment when you find the pivoting element that articulate the old, the new and the future that I find incredibly exciting.
Which of your projects or products are you most proud? Why?
In our recent projects there are a couple of recent projects that stand out in my mind because they propose something beyond architecture and design and become almost entrepreneurial. We rewrote the brief given to us to a certain extent.
We designed an outdoor dining pavilion that was doubling up as a rainwater harvesting system during covid first outbreaks. It was meant to be replicated and was coming with an entire subscription model that allowed all the restaurants to have access to one and to customize their own. Rules for outdoor dining in NYC changed but the prototype was created and had a lot of success.
We just placed 2nd prize at a large vision competition in Quebec, Canada. They asked to reimagine the highway passing along their riverfront, which we proposed to in large part decommission, to rewild the area. We had an entire system to empower the local neighboring communities. They were separated from the water by the highway and we reconnected them to their riverfront.
What are your favorite materials with which to work? Why?
A lot of our early concepts we work in black and white as it allows to focus on the proportions and features. I work often with what is on site and start from there, then build a narrative around the predominant materials of the things we decide to keep. Then I look at using materials to emphasize similarities and contrast between the elements. I almost use materials in a diagrammatic way. So, the answer is that it really depends on the project.
What piece of advice do you wish someone had given you at the start of your career?
I would advise myself to work towards successful design projects as much as to actively seek successful project dynamics. I look back at which project seemed limited in scope in the beginning and turned out exceptional, and which project promised to be outstanding and ended up just looking fine. The difference is in the people and in their matching expectations.
Everybody win or everybody has a hard time. I really believe in this. I thought that I was in a field creating built things, but I found instead that it’s a field about communication, people, aspirations before all. Architecture and interior projects are long. They run over several years sometimes. It needs to go well and it shows when it does. When I see a beautiful project I know that the client chose the right designer, and vice versa, and that they tagged along with the right partners along the way.
What is the most pressing issue in the interior design field today?
Pinterest, IG really helped making beautiful interiors more popular and make people desire great spaces. I love to use the tools as references, but they are only that, a start to a possible. With so many photos of over curated interiors on our feed today, I see some people wanting the photo or several photos at the same time, without the process, without the thoughts, without even the people behind the process sometimes.
My issue with the mass consumption of design in the form of images is that design seeked that way can become close to shopping and less of a creative process. And it can lead to material waste, missed opportunities and lack of discourse in the field. It will only accelerate with AI as the technology samples existing images to create new original ones. The images we consume show beautiful things, but are they exactly what we want? In the search for what we truly desire, each Interior Design and Architecture project can be unique and is the result of a process that usually involves multiple people. In that sense you know more or less where you start but I never know where it will end. It’s about people coming together to create something new, figuring themselves out.
I would love to see more channels talking about the process instead of just showing the result. I think it’s a beautiful field that shouldn’t be reduced to its product.
What’s now?
On the residential side, we (meaning my team and myself) are overseeing the end of construction on the renovation of the oldest wood frame townhouse that the neighbors are calling the Queen of Brooklyn Heights. We are extending the ground floor based on the evidence of an old enclosed porch that was removed in the 1930 that we reinstate. We are starting the studies on our 2nd townhouse renovation out of 11 townhouses around Patchin Place, a small dead end street in the West Village.
Each renovation project is unique and is an opportunity to learn of reconfigure and adjust those old spaces to meet today’s lifestyles. We are being called a lot for historical renovations and I believe that it’s because we are careful in creating respectful interventions for the future of those buildings that set them up for their next few decades of life.
What’s next?
It seems that next is a wellness sustainable hotel upstate and a group of building in Harlem that needs a major extension. I am also embarking into a series of cultural projects such as art galleries, small and larger museums both through competitions and commissions.
Last but not least: what is your favorite band or/and song?
20 years ago, I was an exchange student for 1 full year in Berlin. I still listen to Isolée and Ricardo Villalobos, my electronic music idols.
For more about Côme Ménage, visit re-ad.com