Going Home: The Marriage of Luxury Design, Fashion, Real Estate and Strategic Branding
The Luxury Marketing Council - New York Chapter
in partnership with The Luxury Home Alliance
Upcoming Event
Going Home: The Marriage of Luxury Design, Fashion, Real Estate and Strategic Branding
Date:Thursday, May 11, 2006
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Generously hosted by Marci Sutin Levin, Executive Vice President, SHVO, Exclusive Marketing & Sales and Bassie Deitsch, Director of Marketing, Leviev Boymelgreen.
One would have to be living in a cave not to have observed the powerful nexus of luxury design, fashion, real estate and classic strategic branding/marketing. As the community of developers, designers, architects - all recognizable brands in their own rights - converge and find 'out of the box' ways to 'surprise and delight' the most sophisticated and most affluent consumers of luxury products and services, there seems no limit to the abilities of this powerful community to reinvent new development products and services and to redefine the fundamental assumptions of branding 'living space.’
Enter classic brand-focused, strategic marketing techniques with an emphasis on innovative collaborations and partnerships. Add to this compelling mix an all time high point of fascination with fashion, interior design, development and the home and an understanding of how THE BRAND, or BRANDS TOGETHER, can take traditional real estate business models to a new level of creativity and profitability and you have an evening that cannot be missed.
We also invite you to join us for cocktails after the panel concludes and to experience a 20 Pine Sales Gallery Tour, considered a marketing benchmark in the real estate industry.
Panelists:
Michelle Alfandari
President, MODA International Marketing
Celerie Kemble
Principal, Kemble Interiors
Steve Nobel
Founder and Principal, Nobelinks and Co-founder of The Luxury Home Alliance
Michael Shvo
Founder and President, Shvo
Adam D. Tihany
President, Tihany Design
Time: 6 - 8pm
Location: 20 Pine Street (At the corner of William and Pine Street)
About the Panelists:
Michelle Alfandari
Michelle Alfandari is founder and president of MODA International Marketing, Inc. She established MODA, a full service licensing and marketing company specializing in global representation of trademarks, brands and technology in 1988. She co-founded MODA Marketing & Licensing located in Geneva in 2004. She has over 30 years of business development, licensing, strategic planning, and marketing and sales experience.
She developed MODA into an internationally recognized leader in brand and technology licensing and marketing. MODA’s expertise in developing and implementing national and global strategies for extending and leveraging the equity of brands (to include luxury and mass brands) has been applied to a diverse client base that includes corporations, cultural institutions, hotels, restaurants, publishing and non-profits.
Clients (past & present*) include:
The New York Times*, Champion® Athleticwear, a Division of Sara Lee Corporation*, Lycra® (an Invista, formerly DuPont company)*, Tour de France*, Coty, Inc.*, Trader Vic’s (Nubeco Corporation)*, Ritz Hotel-Paris, National Trust for Historic Preservation*, Bushnell Performance Optics (to include Bushnell, Bollé, Tasco and Serengeti brands)*, National Aquarium in Baltimore, Nature Conservancy, ASE (National Institute for Automotive Services Excellence), Meredith Corporation – Better Homes & Gardens, Victoria & Albert Museum – London, Snap-on Tools, Mack Trucks, Inc.
Celerie Kemble
Celerie Kemble's childhood was in many ways a design tutorial spent in construction sites, antique stores, and in the unique houses designed by her mother, Mimi McMakin of Palm Beach's Kemble Interiors.
After graduating from Harvard, Celerie has been working primarily in Florida and New York helping her clients to, in the words of Michael Boodro of House Beautiful, "incorporate the serendipitous and the sentimental without losing clarity or strength." Celerie finds much inspiration in the ever changing world of New York fashion by ultimately believing design is an expression of individuality, whim, and imagination -- not a product of trends or rules.
Celerie believes that it is her most important responsibility to help her clients fulfill particular and often highly varied design dreams. "My style is uniquely suited to each client and, due to the younger age of much of my clientele, that's all over the map. I think what remains cohesive across our body of work is an infusion of colorful vitality and design irreverence. I enjoy a mix of vintage, traditional, and contemporary that's unencumbered by a fixed formula. Whether I am designing a modern space or a more traditional one, there is always a focus on warmth so the place looks like home, a delightful, exciting place, but home nonetheless."
Celerie has been named as one of the "50 Tastemakers for the Future of Design" by House and Garden, has been listed on House Beautiful's Top Designer's list for past four consecutive years. In addition to her collection with Valtekz, Celerie has launched a line of furniture with Laneventure, wall coverings with Zoffany and fabric line with Braemore.
Steve Nobel
Steve Nobel is the founder and principal of NOBELINKS, a consulting business specializing in the markets for home furnishings and interior design. His clients succeed with strategy to enter in to or expand within these markets for decorative fabrics, furniture and interior design worldwide.
Steve thinks laterally from the point of view of the CEO and knows every facet of the relationship between products and services in the business of design. He is the author of “Aiming at Affluence; Marketing Interior Design to Luxury Clients,” a set of guiding principles that designers use to take their businesses to that rewarding next level.
His wide-ranging networks of professionals are made out of trust, value and shared vision. It is that vision that enables Steve to see trends in design and describe them in useful ways to designers, marketers and others in the loop. He speaks often to large audiences of interior designers in showrooms and design centers throughout North America. After all, he believes that it is not just what you know; it is when you know it.
In 2006, Steve co-founded with Greg Furman the Founder and Chairman of the Luxury Marketing Council, The Luxury Home Alliance for marketers of home furnishings.
A leader in the home furnishings market for over 20 years, he has held executive positions in marketing, planning strategic growth, manufacturing and licensing. He was an owner and the president of The John Widdicomb Company – a maker and marketer of fine furniture worldwide. Significant licensed collections included Mario Buatta and Jacques Grange. He also was Managing Director of Baker, Knapp and Tubbs, Ltd. in London, England.
Michael Shvo
At 33, Michael Shvo is a real estate force to be reckoned with. Charismatic, hard charging, and absolutely representative of a generation that is both luxury brand and technology savvy, he is fast becoming the changing face of real estate new development in the New York City metro area, as well as near term in Miami, Las Vegas, LA, and abroad.
Founder and president of the eponymous Shvo, a business solely focused on the concepting, marketing, and sales of luxury condominiums including ground up and conversions, he brings a visionary’s singular and passionate viewpoint to an industry that has sometimes been accused of being complacent.
With razor sharp insight Shvo works with prominent developers such as The Moinian Group, Leviev Boymelgreen, The Copper Group, The Chetrit Group, Victor Homes and The Claremont Group, to brand their projects through a unique mix of architectural and design concepts, win-win partnerships, out-of-the-box amenities, and world class marketing and sales initiatives that borrow more from luxury fashion and lifestyle than from traditional real estate norms.
Recent examples of Shvo’s unique take on luxury branded real estate includes his bringing three of the most world’s most recognizable names to the condominium arena, that of Armani Casa, Jade Jagger and Philippe Starck and marrying them to projects that embody timeless elegance, rock royalty chic and design innovation.
“In an increasingly noisy real estate marketplace the build it and they will come way of doing business cannot and will not deliver the credibility, value, and awareness that is at the very core of each and every one of Shvo’s strategically branded properties” he notes emphatically.
Today Shvo counts more than 30 new buildings in its pipeline, worth over $10 billion dollars, with projects from the sold out Lumiere, Fultonhaus, and Bryant Park Tower to the industry benchmark 20 Pine The Collection, Interior Design by Armani Casa to extraordinary upcoming propositions including the Jade,16 West 19 Street, Interior Design by Jade Jagger, 8 Union Square South, 650 Sixth Avenue and 111 Fulton Street to name a few.
Israeli-born Shvo came to the US just over a decade ago, after serving in the Israeli army. While quickly flying through the ranks of residential real estate with several record breaking years brokering high-end and high-profile transactions, he introduced a completely new “group” paradigm to the industry resulting in higher performance and profitability, finally emerging in 2003 with a team of 27 reporting to him, as the top broker in his firm, with an astounding $300 million dollars in sales that year.
Adam Tihany
Adam D. Tihany is widely regarded as the preeminent hospitality designer in the world today. His sophisticated, often groundbreaking, designs are the result, in part, of his unique global perspective. He was born in Transylvania in 1948, raised in Israel, and earned his architectural degree from the Politecnico di Milano in Italy. After apprenticing in design firms throughout Europe, he moved to New York City in 1976 to become design director of the firm Unigram. Two years later, Tihany established his own multidisciplinary studio that encompassed all aspects of design, from commercial and residential interior architecture to furniture, products, exhibitions, and graphics.
As a premier hospitality designer, Tihany has created some of the world’s most innovative and highly acclaimed restaurant and hotel projects. Highlights of his work in New York include three four-star restaurants, the highly anticipated Per Se restaurant for celebrated French Laundry chef Thomas Keller in 2004, Le Cirque 2000 for Sirio Maccioni and Jean Georges for Jean-Georges Vongerichten in 1997, as well as The Sea Grill in Rockefeller Center, One c.p.s. in the former Edwardian Room at The Plaza, and The Time hotel in the Times Square vicinity. Among his multi-city design concepts are Bice restaurants worldwide and Spago restaurants for Wolfgang Puck in Las Vegas, Chicago, Mexico City and Palo Alto.
Additional Tihany-designed restaurants for the Maccioni family include Le Cirque in Las Vegas and Mexico City, and Osteria del Circo in New York and Las Vegas. In his native Israel, Tihany transformed the King David and conceived the Dan Eilat hotels. His versatile projects include the recently completed “C” restaurant for Chef Charlie Trotter at the One&Only Palmilla resort in Cabo San Lucas, and Aureole at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas (with the illustrious Wine Tower), and the redesign of Aureole in New York both for Chef Charlie Palmer. Tihany’s luxury concepts in London include the one Michelin star Foliage, The Park, and the ultrachic Mandarin Bar at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, and Monte’s, an upscale private club in Knightsbridge. His numerous residential, corporate, and retail projects include the redesign of Fred Leighton, the Madison Avenue jeweler, and the design, conception and expansion of Tihany’s own Remi restaurants.
More recently, Tihany has completed restaurants Lafite and the Lemon Garden Café at the Shangri-La in Kuala Lumpur, and three hotel projects for the Boscolo Group—the stylish Carlo IV in Prague, and in Rome, public spaces at the landmark Exedra, and the award-winning Aleph hotel (the latter two Boscolo projects were published in a stylish hardcover book, Adam Tihany: Designing in Rome). 2005 marked a new presence in Asia with the opening of The Line at the Shangri-la Hotel in Singapore, public spaces, MO Bar and Amber restaurant at the ultra luxurious Landmark Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong and Jade on 36 restaurant and bar at Pudong Shangri-la, Shanghai. Tihany’s first major architectural commission, Hangar One, a private aviation club in Scottsdale, took off in 2003, as did Excelsior, Tihany’s total renovation of his decade-old Biba restaurant for top Boston chef Lydia Shire. His presence in Las Vegas continued with Bouchon for Thomas Keller at The Venetian (following the success of Bouchon in Napa Valley, which Tihany also designed) and Seablue at the MGM Grand. At The Mirage, Cravings, Tihany’s revolutionary new buffet concept, launched in May 2004; and Teatro, a bar with interiors reminiscent of a fine luxury automobile, unveiled July 2004 at the MGM Grand.
As curator and designer of the GrandHotelSalone exhibit at the Milan Furniture Fair in 2002, Tihany invited ten internationally renowned architects, including Toyo Ito, Richard Meier and Jean Nouvel, to create the “hotel room of the future.” His fully functional boutique hotel lobby included the GHS Restaurant with three superstar chefs. In April 2004, Tihany unveiled DiningDesign, his second consecutive exhibit in Milan, this time a peek at the future of restaurant design as interpreted by talented architects-to-be worldwide.
Tihany has also licensed product lines for several renowned companies: furniture for the Pace Collection and McGuire; custom china, cigar holders, and ashtrays for Villeroy & Boch; Premiere, a new silhouette in porcelain for Schönwald; door hardware for Valli & Valli; fiber optic lighting fixtures for Lucifer; lamps for Baldinger; area rugs for M & M Design International; hospitality linens for Frette. His longstanding association with Christofle has resulted in Collection 3000 barware, including the iconic cocktail glass; Urban flatware; a collection of contemporary Judaica for The Jewish Museum, and K + T Hollowware designed with Thomas Keller.
A recognized authority in architecture and design, Tihany’s numerous honors and awards include an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the New York School of Interior Design (2003), Bon Appetit magazine’s Designer of the Year (2001) was Nation’s Restaurant News’ Innovator of the Year (1999). He was inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame in 1991; was named Who’s Who in Food and Beverage in the United States by The James Beard Foundation in 1997, and was the subject CNN’s "Pinnacle" program in 1997. He is co-author of a cookbook, Venetian Taste (1994), and his monograph, Tihany Design, was published by Monacelli Press in 1999. His second book, Tihany Style, was published by Mondadori Electa in July 2004. He is active in the design world and participates frequently in lectures, panel discussions, and judging competitions.
Leviev Boymelgreen Developers
Real estate visionary Shaya Boymelgreen, who founded his full-service development firm Boymelgreen Developers in 1994, is renowned for his pioneering spirit, prescient investment in emerging neighborhoods and an insistence on world-class design. The firm’s early successes in Toronto, Brooklyn, and on Manhattan’s Lower East Side had profound effects on the vitality and viability of these communities and demonstrated the transformative power of strategic development. Since joining with powerhouse international partners Africa Israel Investments, Ltd. and the Leviev Group in 2002 to form Leviev Boymelgreen, the company has harnessed its collective financial strength, investment acumen, and global reach to build an impressive, multibillion-dollar oeuvre of groundbreaking residential, commercial, and retail properties.
Leviev Boymelgreen is currently developing major projects in three of the most sought after markets in the U.S.:New York, Miami, and Las Vegas. The company is one of the most active developers in New York City with a total of more than eight million square feet of projects completed or under development and a collection of iconic residential properties that has garnered international acclaim. By working closely with local planning and community officials on issues of infrastructure and transportation, Leviev Boymelgreen is contributing to the long-term growth of these important cities while delivering its signature combination of architectural and design excellence, superior quality craftsmanship, and cutting-edge technology.