by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: A dedicated hospitality architect, Stephen Francis Jones, principal of SF Jones Architects, Inc., has been at the forefront of restaurant concept design for nearly 15 years. A former in-house architect for the Wolfgang Puck Food Company, Jones was catapulted to fame when Puck hired him to design his new Spago restaurant in Beverly Hills. Since that time, Jones has created strongly branded identities for numerous restaurants and hospitality endeavors including the Daily Grill restaurants; Ten Pin Alley, a bowling alley/restaurant/lounge for Aston Kutcher’s Dolce Group; and the Murad Inclusive Health Center, a comprehensive medi-spa and wellness institute for Dr. Howard Murad in El Segundo, Calif. Jones’ latest restaurant is Kumo, an all-white sushi bar inspired by the work of sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

Education
I have a bachelor of arts in design and architecture from the University of Florida and a master’s degree from the UCLA architectural program, and I’ve studied abroad in Italy with the University of Washington.

Early career
After I left the University of Florida, I wanted to live in a city that had a little bit more historic architectural significance, so I decided to move to Boston. I worked for Jung/Brannen Associates as a project designer working on 125 High Street, a multi-million-square-foot office complex in the middle of downtown Boston. After that, I got accepted to graduate school at UCLA. But when I moved out to California, I decided to take a year off before starting school to get California residency, so I worked for RTKL in L.A. on a high-rise building and retail spaces. Working on these high rises and big projects, I realized I didn’t like that the projects were so large in scale and took so long to develop and become a real project, so I got a job working for a smaller firm called Grinstein/Daniels.

Grinstein/Daniels was a five-person firm that did a lot of restaurants and specialty projects. I worked on a couple of restaurants and just fell in love with that building type, because they have much quicker turnaround from the time you start design to the time you open the doors. They’re very challenging, because a restaurant is such an intense project type. It has a kitchen component that is very technical and the dining component that is very artful, and it requires creating a design that combines the two to work like a machine. I compare it to designing a sports car because you have a big engine with a nice, sexy body.

After I finished graduate school at UCLA, Hurricane Andrew hit south Florida. My old college roommate was in the construction industry and had his own company there. He called me up, told me I needed to come down and that there were some opportunities to work with him, so I packed my bags and moved to south Florida. I partnered with him, and we rebuilt 10 homes in south Florida that were damaged by the hurricane. Afterwards, I came back to L.A., and that’s when I got a job working for Siegel Diamond Architects. I was head designer on a co-generation plant at UC Davis, which was a really interesting project. But when the project was over, there wasn’t much more work in the office. My wife and I were thinking of moving to San Francisco, but she was finishing up an urban planning project, so I took a filler job working for the Wolfgang Puck Food Company as their in-house architect.

They were expanding their concept for the Wolfgang Puck Cafes, and since I had restaurant experience from my prior job with Grinstein Daniels, I worked for them for about two years. We did a number of restaurants, and I got a different perspective on restaurants from the operator’s side to the owner’s side. It was an enlightening experience because it was not something that traditionally you would get working for an architecture firm. All along, I had this aspiration of wanting to have my own architecture firm, and I quickly realized that this was an opportunity that I could seize upon. Wolfgang and his wife, Barbara Lazaroff, were very supportive of me and really liked my work, so when they decided that they were going to close their famous Spago Restaurant on Sunset and move it to Beverly Hills, they wanted me to design the restaurant for them. Since I was an employee of the Wolfgang Puck Food Company, which was a different entity from the Spago group of investors, I technically wasn’t supposed to be working on outside work, so I quit my job with the Wolfgang Puck Food Company and started my own business and was awarded Spago as my first commission.

The work of SF Jones Architects
Spago was one of the most anticipated restaurants coming in L.A. Everybody wanted to know about the design and see the new location. There was a lot of build-up for it and it turned out to be a super success. That first restaurant put me on a level of architecture designer for restaurants that I probably wouldn’t have been able to work up to working on other projects. From Spago I landed three or four other high-end restaurants. I did another one for Wolfgang Puck and Barbara: Chinois in Las Vegas, and then I did another project in Hawaii, the Diamond Head Grill. Basically, I started building a great number of projects because of my Spago experience. I’ve been in business for 12 years and have been able to create a niche for myself in restaurant design, but I’ve also expanded into other related fields.

I did some residential work and the remodel of the Century Plaza Hotel and Spa. My idea was to do work related to hospitality, so I’ve been doing restaurants and along the way I have been involved with interesting clients, which has afforded me some great opportunities. One of them was in the concept called Lucky Strikes, which is a bowling lounge facility. The owner of Lucky Strikes approached me and wanted to create a new concept of bowling lounges. We did the first one in Hollywood, and it turned out to be a big success. Then he was very ambitious about wanting to do other restaurants and other bowling facilities so we did probably the next 10 of them for him in Orange County, Chicago, Toronto, Miami, and Louisville—all over the country. From that, I became the expert on bowling lounges because it was pretty much a new concept and got other projects, in particular another bowling lounge concept called Big Al’s in Vancouver, and then another in Atlanta called Ten Pin Alley [for Ashton Kutcher’s Dolce Group], which were all sparked from the original concept of the Lucky Strikes.

Design’s role in the resurgence of bowling
With the Lucky Strikes, we basically took the idea of a bowling facility not necessarily as a sporting facility, but as being interwoven with eating, drinking, and socializing—mixed with music and video—so I think we were pioneers in turning around people’s perception of bowling. I think that everybody saw this as a potential new building type, and I was getting tons of calls because of it. The concept of putting together bowling, eating, and lounging is a perfect match, because it’s an event. It’s something to do when you go out to dinner, and it’s extending the social component of the night-out experience. I think that was a big part of its success.

Firm philosophy
When I take on a project, I work as an architect/interior designer/lighting designer. A lot of times, I’ll get the graphic designers as part of my team and really take a holistic approach to design. I think that a good part of my success is to be able to think that way and design that way, so I can apply this to other concepts, whether it be a new concept for a spa or the Daily Grill restaurants. One of the things that we’ve been able to do and where we find our strength has been generating the concept and developing it for maybe the first 5 or 10 units. Once it gets to a point where its more production than roll-out, we’re not as efficient in doing it, nor is that where our expertise lies.

Well designed restaurants seem more the norm now. Has customer design awareness increased to the point that they’re now expecting unusual and elegant spaces in restaurants?
I think so, and I think that when people’s expectations are higher—when they’re going to spend money to go out to a nice restaurant—it’s not all about the food. It’s about the overall environment. It’s about the service. It’s about the ambiance, and it’s very theatric. They go to the restaurants and want to feel important and be in an intimate space or they want to be at Table One and be part of the action. I think that people’s awareness of what it takes design-wise has made restaurateurs aware of the importance of that, and the designs I think have all risen from that.

What’s the most unusual restaurant you’ve designed?
Well, I just finished one called Kumo. I don’t know if I would call it unusual, but it’s a sushi bar that I did for Michael Ovitz in West Hollywood in Melrose. Kumo in Japanese means clouds and he wanted to do an all white restaurant, except for the carpet, which we did in a dark blue. He showed me some work of Noguchi and we used that as inspiration, so there are a lot of free flowing curves and white-on-white and playing with the lighting effects, because white reflects light so well. We were able to work with different textures and lighting and spatial effects so that was unusual, especially for a sushi bar.

Currently reading
I’m a magazine and newspaper reader, so I read articles and stay abreast with local issues. Any spare time I have is spent doing that.

Advice to young architects
Follow your passion. I think that when you get passionate about something and you have a fire, pursue it. Don’t lose that passion and don’t sell yourself short. In architecture, there are so many different avenues you can take. Whether your passion is management or technical, you should always think about how you are going to use this experience to pursue your passion in each job that you work on.