2,700 Pounds Suspended Overhead While You Dine: London’s Concorde Sculpture

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AJ: [00:00:00] Welcome to season three of Once Upon a project where we uncover the wildest most ambitious stories in design. I'm your host, AJ Paron, design futurist for Sandow Design Group, bringing you insights from your favorite design brands, interior Design Magazine, metropolis Design, milk, and Think Lab. Today's episode is one for the books.

Imagine Taking on a Design Challenge. So outrageous, so ambitious, that it sounds nearly impossible, like say, putting a concord inside a restaurant sounds insane, right? Well, for our guest today, that was just another day at the office. Now let's get into it.

We are so excited to bring you this most amazing guest, Neil Ferrier, who runs Discommon. And [00:01:00] Discommon is an industrial design and manufacturing firm based in Greenville, South Carolina. But Neil, you are not from Green Greenville, South Carolina, are you?

Neil: I'm not. I'm gonna give that away as soon as I speak.

I'm from Scotland originally. Uh, but with 11 years in California as well. So there's, there's a whole host of different words that come outta me.

AJ: So let's talk a little bit about this amazing project that I was so fortunate to go visit in London.

Neil: What we're talking about is the largest project that my firm has done to date, both in sheer size and also in probably length of time that it took, but it's a 48 foot long.

We call it a speed form. So a, a shape like the concord that is suspended in the ceiling of an eighth floor restaurant in the Peninsula Hotel in London. It's made of CNC machined aluminum. Um, and I'm sure we'll get into some of the details, but it was the, uh, sort of a very interesting culmination of a whole bunch of steps that ended up there.

Um, and probably a lot of gray hairs as well. [00:02:00]

AJ: I remember when I first heard about this story, they're like, do you wanna talk to the guy that designed an airplane that was going in a restaurant? And I was like, what? Yeah, what's going on? I'm like, hang on, you have to explain this to me. So let's start from the beginning.

Y'all tell us how you got the project. How did this project come to you?

Neil: Yeah, the story is the story of how we got, it's actually really cool and it is one of genuine friendship. I mean, I was messaging. Um, the sort of son of the family that owns the Hong Kong Shanghai. Hotel group this morning, they have become friends.

Um, so we have a brand as well as a design firm. The brand is called dis Common Goods. We make stuff for everyday life that, that we sort of re-engineer to be better. So that stuff that we love. And I was at a racetrack. I. Met a guy, uh, who had one of our wallets that had been gifted to, and I did the usual thing where I like, you know, school kid out and I'm like, oh my gosh, that's one of our products.

And we chatted race cars and, and product design and [00:03:00] everything. And I didn't know, you know, what, what his business was. Ended up buying, uh, another product from us. I think he bought a, a pen knife, uh, sorry, a pocket knife that we did a collaboration with the company. And then he said, I'd really like to get my father a table.

A limited edition coffee table that we were doing with very beautiful car speed forms coming out the surface of it. We did a Lamborghini mirror for them, um, and I started to know a little bit more about their business and they commissioned another couple of pieces of furniture for homes in Hong Kong.

And at this point in time, we were becoming friendly and I knew that they, um, they owned the Peninsula Hotels worldwide and. You, it was just great fun doing those projects and we continue to be car friends and talk about design and talk about projects. And then, you know, that call comes the one that's like, oh boy, the call was, can you come to a meeting, um, with some architects?

Archer Humphreys is the name of the architecture firm. We're building a new, uh, peninsula Hotel in London, and the story of that hotel is insane. Uh, sir Michael Kuri, the, the [00:04:00] sort of owner of the Hong Kong Shanghai Hotel Group. I may get my numbers wrong, but I think he waited in the region of 29 years for that plot of land on Hyde Park corner, um, because it is

AJ: a primo spot.

Neil: Yeah. He knew what he wanted and, you know, that was it. This is, this is gonna be a, a generational property, you know, and feasibly one of the last ever great. Luxury hotels built Weird thing for me to say, like, no, there'll be a Four Seasons that goes in Bali or a something, something. And you know, Mexico City that opens.

But this is, you know, you visited aj, it's one of these places that you can't really fathom how they could build another one.

AJ: Mm-hmm. And

Neil: so Archer Humphreys were doing, um, a. A different number of parts of that hotel, and one of them was, there's Brooklyn's, um, kind of a floor. There's the Brooklyn's uh, restaurant and the Brooklyn's lounge.

And Brooklyn's is an area in the UK where Bentley originated, but also where the Concord was built. I sit down in a meeting and they bring up sort of architect drawings, and the first ones a sideways cross section. They're [00:05:00] like, we wanted see if you guys could make something kind of big. And it was as the sort of drawing rotated to show the the floor plan from the top down that I went, oh shit, that's a Concord.

That's not small either. That's the whole size of the restaurant. I'd already showed up. I was in London for something else. I was in London for a watch project. I already showed up to like the Hong Kong Shanghai Hotel group. Like there's nobody in that meeting. It's not in a shirt and tie with a pocket square and like dialed in.

I was already in like euro shorts and a polo shirt. You know, I was already an outcast in the meeting room. And I had one of those genuine out out body experiences where I said, ah, yep, yeah, we got it. We'll do it. Let's do it. And I, I remember like walking out of, after the meeting, you know, we talked about a lot of other things.

I went, oh God, my team's gonna kill me. Like, uh, it, it was a good like, moment of breathing out in, in Hyde Park afterwards, like, yeah, we have, yeah, yeah, yeah. We got this. Yeah, we can figure

AJ: that out. Did you have any idea how you were going to do this when you [00:06:00] said yes.

Neil: I knew that there was gonna be a pitch process, so it's a publicly traded company.

We were suggested by the family we had to win our position and I knew that there were a couple other companies bidding on it who did props in the movie industry. Mm-hmm. And their methodology for manufacturing this was either going to be thin gauge sheet metal that was kind of beaten or pounded into a shape, or, um, actually we later found out foam that would sort of just get sprayed afterwards.

I thought, you know, I, I really have to stay true to our brand here and do this the way that I would do it for the Peninsula, which we already have a very good relationship with this company. Neil Faye, they machine aluminum and they do incredible stuff. Facades, they make whiskey cups for us all the way up to huge, you know, they made a table for Johnny.

Ive and Mark Newin. It was one of the most expensive dining tables ever sold. The capability of making the metal was in our back pocket, but. I was only going to do it that way. So I knew that it was gonna be an uphill battle from the get go where I was gonna have to stand my ground and [00:07:00] just say, the only way we know how to do this is really right.

And that probably meant, I don't know, it probably meant we were three x the price of anybody else. And a number of times we were asked to knock it back. And I said, no, come on. Like you've, you've told us that this is a once in a generation hotel. I'm only pitching doing it this way. It took 600 days to get the contract.

AJ: Oh, wow.

Neil: Um, so there were plenty of times that I thought that we weren't doing it, but our methodology of doing it was that, you know, one inch squared of this piece was no different than 48 feet of it. So down the entire surface of this plane, this sculpture. All of the machining marks from the C NNC machine show across the entire thing.

And they all connect from panel to panel to panel, and, and I just knew we have this cool saying a giant problem is just a series of a ton of smaller problems that need to be solved beautifully. So I'm always relatively calm that no matter how big the problem is, all right, we just gotta sit down and.

Break it up into small ones. 'cause if they're [00:08:00] small, then we can definitely fix 'em. That worked like pretty well for most of the project, but there were definitely, so sprinklers in a hollow aluminum plane was not a small problem.

AJ: I bet. Yeah. So did they have a budget that you had to try and meet, or was like the budget, you just tell us how much it's gonna take to build it and we'll see how you come out in the pitch process?

Neil: Yeah. There was a budget and. We blew through it, but also we almost lost money on it, or we could have lost money. Okay. So this thing to do again, should have been well into, I mean, I, I, I won't talk, you know, the, the actual numbers, but let's say we were 1.5 x the budget. Mm-hmm. It should have been 2.5 or three x.

AJ: Oh wow.

Neil: But also fundamentally. I mean, and I say that aj 'cause we worked on this thing for four years, three and a half years. Yeah. The, the pricing was a constant thing. I mean, the structural engineer on it was something like $75,000. I didn't even know we would need a structural engineer. Like this was a baptism.

Right. But the [00:09:00] structural engineer was amazing. We found him through a friend and he'd done a, a, a world championship ski jump in Denmark. Um, and I, if a guy can do like this hanging ski jump, he can help us hang a, you know, a plane.

AJ: That's crazy. Yeah,

Neil: it was wild.

AJ: Okay, Neil, you have to walk our listeners through the, the complexity of the feasibility to actually get this.

It's one thing to build it, it's another thing to get it installed and like this is not on the ground floor. This is like what isn't on the top floor of the hotel.

Neil: One of the craziest things that we had to do was take a risk and estimate the weight of the sculpture with safety factor included. Which involved engaging the structural engineer before we had the contract.

And anybody who's in business would be like, you're tripping Neil. Like there's no way that you would've done that. Well, cool. But they were building the hotel and the concrete of the ceiling needed to be poured.

AJ: Oh, yeah.

Neil: And so that [00:10:00] ceiling, this plane is anchored only in four positions and there's an entire sort of floating trus system underneath it.

But the ceiling obviously had to have a weight bearing rating. Uh, and we had to put in these wild, it's almost like a, an eyelet that goes into the ceiling, but it goes into the concrete in this huge pocket of resin. Um, and that's sort of what gives it its strength. I'm not even gonna try and explain it anymore than that, but if you can imagine sticking four eyelets into a concrete ceiling with like a ton of glue around it, that's basically what's in there.

AJ: Hmm.

Neil: And so we had to commit to that. Um, we didn't have the project and there was definitely some meetings, right? So this would be really cool if you guys would actually give us a project. But you know, the number of teams that are involved in something that, that large, it was just an entirely different group that was doing all of the concrete pours and everything.

So that was a bit scary. 'cause we were probably 20, you know, we're not a huge company. We were 25 grand of, you know. Guess work in, before we even got into the project

AJ: there, there's a huge risk factor because this [00:11:00] airplane, this Concord is sitting on top of where everyone's sitting and having dinner.

Neil: This is a ba we don't like you don't talk about fight club aj.

I don't want to, I don't talk about the fact that this thing is hanging above stuff. Okay. Yeah. Um, there was, there was like a safety factor of two and a half, which I said, screw it. Let's double plus like, what happens if so? I'm gonna, I'll backpedal a second and set the tone right. You walk into this restaurant through basically a doorway that's really only three or four humans wide, and the instant that you look up there is the tip of a concord pointing at your nose, and it basically goes the rest of the room.

And one might imagine that this is a, you know, 20 foot high type of, you know, huge cavernous sort of restaurant. You could damn near jump up and touch that plane like it is there. Um, and so it, it's massive. And we didn't really register how small the restaurant was, you know, so going in was crazy. Um, we were one of the last things to go in.

So there [00:12:00] are like hand knotted carpets in there that were, you know, 11 months to make the constellation of the night sky into this carpet. And I don't even wanna know what the wood floors cost and everything. This company, um. That helped us basically install everything. Teche was their name, T-E-T-E-K-N-E.

They were sort of the install team there. Like when you get matched for the team of wizards, there's no better joy than that. You know, they helped figure out how we would make a false floor on top of everything to get the lifts in and stuff. But we did something really sick, like for this being a design podcast, um, where it got shipped over in 14 crates.

Neil Faye helped us make these custom wooden crates. None of us had done custom wooden crates before. The crates all held a series of components in them, a series of panels sub assembled that were one area of a plane. We then took all of the lids of the crates off and in [00:13:00] them there was, if you imagine the inside of an egg container, there were, there was, um, a bunch of sort of shapes, right, of foam.

When you flip them onto the ground and laid them together, they became the negative of the underside of the Concorde. So we were able to build it. On the lids of the shipping containers. And this thing was now completely supported as you're building it on the floor. And the entire thing got built on like a foam negative, if you imagine.

AJ: Oh, that's cool. So like, I

Neil: mean, you know, like a Tempur-Pedic mattress. Imagine you shoved your hand into the mattress. You would leave a negative of the hand we built. On a Tempur-Pedic mattress, basically, which was just when we, you know, when we're looking at it on a computer screen in 3D cad, we're all giggling like children.

Like, I think this could work. Like we're gonna do this. Uh, and that was like one of the most satisfying things that nobody will ever see, you know? But at one point in time, the whole Concord was just laying on the restaurant floor. Before getting lifted up and um, Jeremy, my head engineer, he was in London a little bit longer than me and he texted me at one point in time and just said, mate, I think [00:14:00] it works.

You know, like, I think,

AJ: yay.

Neil: Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't that cavalier, but you know, it was a little cavalier in

AJ: That is crazy. Okay, so let's back up just a little bit because I know our audience is gonna wanna know. How did, if you were over budget, how did you win the pitch?

Neil: I remember one email that I wrote, like a good Neil four paragraph, or, you know, my, my, my team know this one when I'm like, when I'm painting a story and I just said like, I really am going to put my foot in the sand here that I love this brand.

I love that I'm friends with the brand and I love that everything that this stands for. Um, you know, the, the Peninsula does. And I just sort of think that if you guys. Kind of, I don't know that I said took a look in the mirror, but if you guys took a moment, you would know that there really is only one way to do this and that it has to happen that way.

And Philip, my friend, who's uh, who works with the Hong Kong Shanghai Hotel Group, he understood my beliefs [00:15:00] and also the architect Archer Humphreys. So David Archer, who's the principal of that team. You know, they, we got to know them over the course of this, and I think they trusted our execution. Like they'd seen the way that we worked.

We did weekly meetings on this for, for years, you know, as we were going through the pitch process and stuff. So I think, um, I. Somebody goes with a team, you go with a design firm, you go with a manufacturer, you go with, you know, a new employee because you're basically the, the end goal of anybody is to reduce risk, um, or increase safety in the result.

If you're a medical firm, um, you want a great design firm because you want your medical product A, to function well, but B, you want to reduce the risk of getting to market so that you can make revenue, I hope. Or I think that they felt like, yep, this is, these are partners, you know, they are going to bleed in this with us.

And I guess that's what you know. Allowed the budget to to flex.[00:16:00]

AJ: So it sounded like you were very unwilling to compromise on a few things as you were designing this 'cause you felt that it was really important to have it. What were those things that you refused to compromise on

Neil: a process? So every panel is CNC machine. So, um, uh, Neil Faye helped us, a guy Sawyer there who's just, he was again, like, he became part of our family or our team on this.

But basically you have 300 and I forget exactly 360 panels in the region of, let's call 'em two feet by two feet. And they all have to connect together. And the architect's vision was that this was going to be a monolithic sculpture. It was just a body of metal. Um, we had some fun arguments about that because actually if you ever look at a real Concord, it is just a mishmash of panels.

It, it looks a little bit like the space shuttle. It's just kind of penalized metal. Um, but there was a cleat designed that was a triangle and all of the. Screws. The three screws that go into the [00:17:00] tips of that triangle, they all point at an angle. So they basically pull tension inwards. Hmm. And when you put two panels together in this build out and you screw the screws in, it actually pulls those panels together.

And at a glance, or in any photographs, this entire 48 foot thing looks damn near seamless. Um, and so in my mind, you know. Aj, we make a $300 whiskey cup because I'm somewhat uncompromising. You know, it's um, you can bleep me out, but we have a statement internally that's fuck mediocrity. And it's, it's, I love that

AJ: it's just a

Neil: principle of living.

So

AJ: yes.

Neil: Could we have executed a foam, one of these? Of course we could have, you know, we would've worked with a Sure, a foam router shop and figured out how to metalize it and stuff like that. And every time I went into that restaurant, I'd be like, this sucks. It was made of foam. So I, uh, you know, we really asked ourselves, what's the version of this that is like, this doesn't suck, this is epic.

And machining allowed us to. Control every one of those inches, if you like. [00:18:00] Where these toolpaths, you know, when a cutting a ball mill, a cutting circle on a CNC machine is, is ripping away this metal, it's pre-programmed where that thing ends on a panel, so you know where you could start it on another panel.

So we have these lines that go 40 feet down the, the plane. And it really gives a sense of motion. You know, almost like yes, if you rain beads on a window or something like that, you know, you can imagine them getting blown. And that to me was the, the level of precision that I wanted to get. The memory or the feeling that I have of staying at a Peninsula Hotel.

AJ: It is amazing because you are so high up. In the hotel as far as a level. Right. And when you walk into the elevator, it makes a hot air balloon sound when it goes up. And you have, there's all these detailing in the bar, in the hallway about airplanes and, and luxury flights and, and design. Yep. It's, I mean, it's quite impressive, but when you walk in that space, because you're so high up and you're [00:19:00] looking at this concord, it feels like it is flying.

At your face. Yeah, I mean

Neil: it's pretty wild. And again, the something that I've been really careful to do through the whole process of this is that was David Archer. Like that's the architects. That had the kaons to decide that that was going to happen. You know, I still remember my reaction to seeing those technical drawings.

We didn't come up with the idea of putting a concord in the ceiling. The cool thing is we were allowed to design it and, and when you look at the form of it, it isn't the Concord. Like we designed a shape. Yeah. And Kevin, my head designer. I mean, his ability with surfaces and to create something that is static but looks like it is in motion is like, you know, tip of the hat mate.

Like it's, it's bloody good. And, and we really created a form that had a glances, of course a Concorde. There's little air lines that we've kept in there from the plane, but we removed, for instance, the complete engine units that sit underneath the wings. 'cause there's big boxes. It all leads to this sort of, you know, much greater sense of motion.

AJ: It almost looks like a [00:20:00] new version of the Concord,

Neil: somebody called it the silver Surfer version of a Concord. 'cause it looked like a sort of, you know, the Silver Surfer from the Fantastic Four, or from from Marvel. Uh, it sort of has that liquid metal look of moving. That's kind a cool description.

AJ: Yes. And the leveled of detail is.

Amazing. You can see the level of detail that you've put into this. So let me ask you this hypothetical question. If you needed to make this entity actually fly, on a scale of one to 10, one being absolutely cannot fly at all, like is, is is not ready to fly and 10 is ready to go, where is. The structure on that one to 10.

Okay,

Neil: so let's go with the hypothetical. I'm allowed as big an engine as I need, right?

AJ: Yes, yes.

Neil: Um, and also this is really cute. We did design it so that if it ever get, if that restaurant, I mean, I, I have to imagine that's a minimum 10 year restaurant, maybe yes, maybe 20 year. But if it ever got removed, right, it is engineered to be [00:21:00] able to have the top of it put on.

Um, so as it stands, it disappears into the ceiling. So it basically stops two thirds up the height. It wouldn't fly. However, the wings do have an alo profile to them. Um, and it is not an un aerodynamic shape, uh, but it would absolutely need fettle. The cool thing is it's pretty damn light overall in the, for the size of it, because those panels.

So, um, one of the neat things about that, uh, is if it's a really sideways, bright day, like, I don't know, 4:00 PM 6:00 PM in the summer, um, in, in the uk and there's a side light coming in. You almost get this slight hint of these almost geometric lines on it, and you can't really tell what it is. And it's actually that the aluminum is machined so thin.

On the backside we, there is a honeycomb, if you imagine a bees honeycomb, there's a honeycomb structure on the backside to give it stiffness. But in these negative areas, we're down to sub one millimeter thickness to keep, um, to keep this thing light. So it actually weighs under a ton. Like [00:22:00] we could, we could pick up the wings and stuff like that.

Um. So it's light enough. Yeah. Stick a big enough engine on it. I don't think it would fly very well, uh, straight or uh, uh, but if you wanted to make a very fast flying dart yes, it would, it would successfully do that.

AJ: So I hear five on that scale. A one to 10. I have four. You need a big Oh, okay. A four. Okay.

All right. That's, that's fair. Not a zero, but

Neil: definitely not 10. That's great. You'd have to detach the damn sprinklers. That took us forever to figure out. I'm gonna tell you about the sprinklers because at some point in time when this thing was finished, ready to go, it was announced that we needed four sprinklers inside the plane.

AJ: And that's kind of a big deal like. The, the building wouldn't let the restaurant open if this, they don't have the sprinklers, like designers understand this.

Neil: This was huge actually. Um, it was originally planned that the arc of the other sprinklers would manage to do it, blah, blah, blah. What this meant was that at some point in the process of this going up, it had to stop, which was [00:23:00] actually one foot from the ceiling.

So sprinkler systems normally hard piped metal to, to a sprinkler head. They managed to get approved. This, let's call it like a flex. Tube, uh, you know, a flex pipe that really wasn't that flexible and it had to get basically like manipulated down inside the Concorde to get attached into the areas that we had, um, now engineered to, to have sprinkler heads in it.

They're a bit of bummer actually, 'cause they're chrome, the ones that are in the body of the plane. And we weren't allowed to re-engineer or recoat a sprinkler head because it's approved by fire. And it would've had to go through like a full, like you have to use a UK. Gov approved fire sprinkler ahead.

Um, and there's two shiny silver sprinklers on it and that kind of sucked 'cause everything else is the same finish. Um, even the, there's like a, there's an area microphone in the plane that, um, helps understand how much noise is in the room. Um, and it helps the sound system, uh, even out the, the noise. So we had to figure out a mounting point for a [00:24:00] microphone in that.

And of course there's also 20 something lights. That are engineered into it too. So

AJ: I couldn't find the sprinkler heads. I have to tell you, I couldn't find the sprinkler heads.

Neil: Um, I haven't looked at it in so long, but they are, they're back on wings, uh, somewhere. Okay. Um, and, uh, but there are two sprinkler heads that overlap.

1. Their, their, their arc of spraying water overlaps with the plane. So another thing that added three months in was that we had to design panels that are two of the panels instead of being held in by these beautiful cleats that we fully engineered over months and months and months, they're held in with magnets because if the wings fill with water, the, the panels have to fall out so that the waster empties outta the plane, fire alarm goes off.

Everybody evacs sprinklers go for a designated amount of time, which is like. Basically until the fire department turn it off. So you have sprinklers pumping an unbelievable number of gallons of water this entire time, and the whole plane's hollow. So, you know, that was another one. We were like, we're right in the finish line.

And [00:25:00] then Mark Weinraub, who's the, the lead project on all of this is he was managing the build of basically his whole chunk of the hotel. We'd sit in these meetings on a Friday morning and he'd be like, all right guys, well we've got a, we've got a thing to talk about this week. And I'd like, oh, no, Mark's come the thing.

And that, that time it was the sprinklers.

AJ: Oh my gosh.

What scared you the most about this project?

Neil: Uh, weirdly enough, the, the strangest thing that scared me because I didn't have an answer for it, is how it was actually gonna sag in the first two or three weeks of being installed. So, aluminum is a hardish material, but if you imagine the wingspan of this thing and the fact that it's all panels, like it is going to relax, right?

We had modeled, or we tried to model the fact that at least it was gonna relax. It was [00:26:00] already on a slight arc, and it was gonna relax in that arc down the way. So like all of those panels were gonna get. Pinched together rather than opened up. So they shouldn't have created any gaps. But when I went to the grand opening of the peninsula, which was kind of like six months, seven months after we'd installed it, and I was wild, I was partying with all my London friends underneath this thing.

I was also, you know, three drinks and staring very intently every one of the cracks, um, deciding what it looked like. And that was actually my first moment of sort of proper relief of like. Shoot, like, you know that the engineering of those cleats with, with Jeremy and Sawyer at Neil Faye working really well together, was it worked?

Um, so it's a strange thing to be nervous about, but like, I am, I, my, my trauma, I feel like my, my fear, my trauma is from being bullied when I was younger. So like, I want my friends to like things, so I wanted to be like, I'm judged by my peers. So that was my, like the thing that I needed to be okay with.

I'm losing [00:27:00] money. I didn't wanna lose money on it. Well,

AJ: yeah, I think all good designers have that history.

Neil: Yeah, I think, I think most driven entrepreneurs have a trauma that is causing them to throw a middle finger to whatever that trauma was by trying to prove the world that they are able to do something.

AJ: That's a, that's fascinating. What battle did you lose with the client that you're still kind of obsessing or thinking about like, gosh, I wish we would've been able to do this.

Neil: I wanted to do the rest of the ceiling. Um, and the ceiling is just, just, I should not say just to any, my friends and the, and the project that listen to this is not just, but the ceiling is just sheet metal and wrapped leather panels.

Um, and I wanted us to be able to machine all of it. Um, and we did pitch on that. We, we, we quoted on that, but I knew that we were gonna be too much.

AJ: What would you have done?

Neil: Um, it would've been the same design because you're, you're, you're basically matching into what Archer Humphreys designed, which is essentially a, a nod to shock waves down the entire ceiling.

Okay. But it is [00:28:00] sort of a satin finished. Flat sheet metal of aluminum. And the other side of it is, um, a sat, it's a triangle, um, like a lerone bar. It's a triangle on the ceiling, but the front side of it is leather wrapped around some kind of, you know, foam or board or something like that. And that metal side, like again, if we'd been left to do it with a texture and the surface finish had exactly matched this sort of like satin scotch braided finish that we did on the Concord, my soul would've just been like, whoa, this is that, like.

Epic tier more creative. I also wish there'd been budget to make like 200 sculptures, small sculptures for all of the team involved. That would've been sick.

AJ: Oh, that's a great idea.

Neil: It will probably be one of these things we broached as peninsula one day. But you know, something that could be in a hotel store that is a, a nod to the experience that people had upstairs.

AJ: So one of the things like walking through the space that. Kind of really [00:29:00] resonates is if you have a love for speed and luxury vehicles, whether it's an airplane or a Bentley or something like that, you're gonna love this space.

Neil: Okay. It's coach work. Yes. Um, is how I would describe it. So the Kauri family have a, a love for locomotion.

Um, they have a world-class car collection, including like a, a significant number of pre-war Bentleys that raced at LA Mall. Um, there's an old story of this group called the Bentley Boys. They were the renegades that took Bentley to LA Mall, um, and the whole Brooklyn's bar. So the place opposite the restaurant is sort of Bentley themed, but there's a very old school British coach working vibe to it where there's incredible leather work and quilting and tufting and, you know, woodwork and metal panelizing and stuff like that.

It's definitely. There's an art deco nature to it, but it's just, um, rich.

AJ: Yeah. It's very luxurious. Yeah. And very, I mean, it is an experience. It's not just [00:30:00] a space, it is a total experience from the sound to the, the materiality in the space. I mean, it's, it's, I have to

Neil: really commend the architects on that because you imagine having to do that themed, make it car themed and airplane themed, but don't be kitch.

Like that's a Exactly, that's a really cool challenge to do that with elegance. Um, yeah. That's, that's not a, that's not a joke, you know? Um, and I probably wouldn't have had the courage to do as much as they did, because I would've assumed that it would've been kitch.

AJ: Yeah.

Neil: Uh, but it's not, it's, it's elegant.

AJ: It's, it's, it's a fabulous experience. It's been a good six months since it's been up and the restaurant's open and people are going in and, and whenever I'm in London, I'm starting to see it advertised. The restaurant advertised everywhere. It is the new place to go. Yeah. They

Neil: just retained their two Michelin star last week.

That's really

AJ: exciting.

Neil: Yep.

AJ: So in the, in the last six months, I'm sure people have written about it, there's feedback that has happened. If [00:31:00] you could erase. One piece of feedback that you've received during the project or after the project, what would it be?

Neil: Um, do you want a list of things? Um, so I think this, I think the Sunday Times said that the Peninsula put the airframe of the last existing Concord into the ceiling of, uh, the.

Hotel. Um, it's been called a steel mockup twice. Um, um, we have been not credited with it in at least three or four articles. I you could, you could, you could touch some, um, electric nerves here. Uh, you know, my hilarious mess up and all of this was that at no point in time did we request that there be a plaque that states that this work was ours.

Um, and, and actually it was quite a difficult part of just communicating, like you imagine like it's an entire hotel, an entire staff, staff rotates and, and people ask them and it's not very clear. Um, [00:32:00] and that was actually a difficult thing as well, like when we were doing all the initial press on it, you know, Archer Humphreys did the architecture of that entire place.

They deserve a massive amount of press and credit for it. Techni, unbelievable. Fabrication and install company did all of the stuff for the, um, all of the panels, the walls, the wood, the everything that was installed. Um, we did a concord, it's like who tells what story? Yeah. Um, but I, as a small company, I wish that we'd all figured out a clearer way to be like, there are these weapons, these guys, this common that can take.

You know, a big seeming problem and turn it into something magical. I also thought it was really hilarious. Yeah, the first and also the first influencer that leaked it. And she had like millions of followers. She was like, oh my God. I went to the peninsula and the first thing I saw was the fact that they put a real Concord airplane in the ceiling.

I was like, where are the humans gonna sit? [00:33:00] Like, what? Who educated you on this?

AJ: It's not that big. No, it's not. Yeah.

Neil: I have been inside it and I fill up the width of it when I'm in it, and so

AJ: That's so funny. Um, so let me. Ask a different side of that question. Was that your biggest ego check in, in, in the project that it was like it was hard to get recognition for the work that was done?

Or was there a different aspect that like really put your ego aside and go, ugh. Wow.

Neil: The CEO at Oakley, where I used to, um, work, I worked there for 11 years, he had a great thing that like everybody's ego needs to stay in a bucket underneath the table. Um, and every now and then you can grab that bucket and you can take a little drink of it.

You could dunk yourself in it if you want, if you really crush something, but you stick that fucking ego back under your desk. That was the, that was the, the rule at Oakley. I worked with a bunch of alphas, you know, everybody was a game at Oakley. Yeah. Um, so there wasn't much ego in this. What I really [00:34:00] wanted for us and for my team was the recognition to say that like.

Like getting work is hard, aj, you know, like, it, it is hard to fill a schedule with, um, companies to pay you, even with notoriety, even with an endless number of projects that you have delivered 11 out of 10 on. You still have to work to find those people, and I hope I was gonna say hoped, but continue to hope that that continues to make our.

Life a little simpler of like, we can lay that out on the table. Um, and, and it's like, oh, right, these guys can, you know. Um, so from an ego standpoint, I've definitely used it a couple times to, um, there was a massive furniture factory that I recently just visited in, um. Mexico City or just outside of Mexico City, an astonishing woodworking factory that I wanna use for a project.

And it was the day before I, I only knew that they [00:35:00] existed after I was already in Mexico City. I was like, how do I go there? And my friend's like, dude, just drop the concord bomb on them. Um, and sure enough I was like, yeah, I can just. Dumped the concord on the table and you know, so I sent a, a message to them and I threw in a picture of the Concord and I was like, we do this, and the phone call came back pretty quick.

AJ: That made you feel good, didn't it?

Neil: Yes. This is an okay calling card.

AJ: Yes. You actually should make little cards, like business cards with probably,

Neil: yeah. These are all smart things. We should or though the, the, the downside of it, A GN. That everybody assume they get scared of us and they just assume that we, we must be an absolute fortune to work with.

And then they don't even, you know, engage. I was talking to an amazing coffee company yesterday that we may well work on on a machine with, and I think he was terrified to ask the price of us because he knew that we stuck a 50 foot long concord in a hotel, you know? Um, right. So it, there's no predictability to any of this, and I guarantee you any other owner of a design or agra a branding firm or anything that listens to this, would probably crack up laughing and be like, oh my gosh, I've been there as [00:36:00] well.

Yes.

AJ: Like

Neil: most of the, the money that, like the la the most successful project we've ever had, um, as a design firm was when we were manufacturing a plastic accessory that we designed. And we manufactured a ton of them. Um, and that made a good chunk of money. And it isn't sexy and it isn't cool or any of those things, you know, like it's not.

Everything's just the perception that you put out there, basically. Right. It's the, it's the pro and con of Instagram,

AJ: and I think every design firm has to compromise and, and take the base work. That's not the most sexy work. Yep. But it keeps the staff going and, and the business going. And then you can, you know, have hopefully some opportunities to do the real fun stuff that is complicated.

So it's the biggest

Neil: balance for us because we're a, you know, sort of four or five person team that, um, that that project bandwidth planning is extremely, um. Important for us because if one finishes and there isn't one to fill it, you've, you've got a hole, right? Because we don't have, we keep it pretty tight.

AJ: So what's next for you, Neil?

Neil: So the Concord has turned into something [00:37:00] else that is not fully contracted yet. I. But it has an absolute verbal yes from the board. And if it doesn't happen, I will come back on the podcast and tell the whole dang story of it because I will be so mad. Okay. That's a deal. It's, but it's in Asia and it's going to be at a building that's to do with flight.

AJ: Mm.

Neil: Airplanes leave from it. Um, and it's a, it's a big install, but it is basically back in that exact same process of the Concord where we sit and beat our hands on the table and say, no, we will only do it this way. And they say, that's too expensive. And I say, it's not that expensive for, but we'll only do it this way.

So.

AJ: I can't wait to hear about it. I cannot wait. Well, thank you so much, Neil. You've been a pleasure to have on the show, but is there anything else you wanna close with? No,

Neil: I just do the standard of like, I'm just the creative director. I'm the nut job that says yes to it and runs around like a headless chicken policing it.

It was, you know, Kev, Jeremy Sawyer, Alex, who owns Neil Faye team at Tech Me [00:38:00] and everything that, that, uh, that were all shepherded by this one guy, mark Weintraub, who, who project managed the whole thing. You know, I was just a nut job that forced it to, to happen. So it's, it's pretty cool when you get to work with a team like that.

AJ: Well, thank you so much, Neil, for sharing the ups and downs and, and the amazing story of how you put a Concord in a restaurant. So we really appreciate you being on the show.

Neil: Thanks for having me.

AJ: And that's a wrap on another unbelievable design journey. A huge thank you to Neil for taking us behind the scenes of this incredible project and for proving that even the most wild, ambitious ideas can become reality with the right team. And always a huge thank you to our amazing production team, Rachel, Senator and Rob Schulte for bringing these stories to life.

We will be back soon with more epic design stories. Until then, keep dreaming big, [00:39:00] keep pushing creative limits, and we'll see you on the next once upon a project.

Oh, wow. Yes. Okay. Do you please? All right, here we go. Rivets step into the body of the concor. I feel like I'm in a airplane right now. The little windows. Mm-hmm. I can see outside. Really the windows were this small.

Neil: I guess there need to be too. 'cause otherwise you'd have to reinforce themselves.

AJ: But the size of my hand, the windows are So it's kind of like being in the interior.

Yes. The, the body of the car very inspired. Yeah. Windshield shape. So it's like you're driving. Oh, that's amazing. Staring at Wellington Arch. Yes. I see that. I mean, talk about walking back in time. It's very cool.