Quality inspection at fabricators studio of components for a Jean Prouvé door restoration.
As a child, I was interested in how things were built and came together, and I was fascinated by finishes and how things looked. Just a car ride through Miami looking at all the styles of houses — some ordinary, some extraordinary, some terrible — was a great outing for me. I studied architecture with a focus on New Urbanism, under the tutelage of award-winning and inspiring Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.
After school, I moved to New York and worked in the offices of Kohn Pedersen Fox, Ulrich Franzen, and with Paris-based Andrée Putman of Ecart International. I was involved in projects with incredible design with the most exquisite details. As my projects went into construction, I found myself going more and more to job sites. I instantly fell in love with the craft of building. Being on a job was more exciting for me than being at a drafting table. Something about the materials in my hands and creating the physical form spoke to me in a way that the purely cerebral didn’t.
To me, there’s nothing quite like partnering with architects and designers — working directly with them to make their vision a reality. It is just as rewarding as designing something yourself. Out of this discovery came the founding of my company AE Greyson more than a quarter century ago.
Over the years, I’ve worked with incredible clients like Henry Kravis, Aby Rosen, and Edgar Bronfman; and architects like Richard Meier, Annabelle Selldorf, Charles Gwathmey, Robert A.M. Stern, Haynes-Roberts and William McIntosh on rewarding bespoke projects. I have sourced material from East Africa to the Philippines. I have sought out and found the greatest crafts people and collaborators I could have ever imagined from millworkers in Italy and Switzerland to metalworkers skilled in period cast iron forging in France. They have deepened my appreciation of every aspect of the work.
Moreover, being a builder has allowed me to stay in constant dialogue with the artisans who bring elements of design to life. Imagine being able to see how the most exquisite mosaic is created, or watch the iterative process of applying lacquer. Among my favorite artisans to watch work is wood finisher Paul Ebbitts, who utilizes a true French polishing process. Paul applies multiple layers of lacquer needed to build up the thickness of the finish so that the multi-stepped hand rubbed polishing can take place. It’s the hand rubbing in the finished work which renders the beauty of this age-old process traditionally used on wood. I will be sharing their stories and more in future editions of Specifications.
