How Airbnb Built an In-House Architectural Design Team
According to the designer who, with his wife, helps translates Airbnb’s digital presence into physical experiences.
Airbnb is one of the most intriguing big tech companies to emerge in the last decade. Not only is it one of the few truly design-led Silicon Valley unicorns — two of the founders, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, both studied industrial design at RISD — but it is one of the few companies to tackle the challenge of using technology to enable real-world experiences. And it is perhaps the only Silicon Valley company to attempt to make all the experiences it provides (online and off) rewarding for its customers.
Since the company’s founding in 2008, Airbnb has consistently put design at the forefront, employing old-school design methodologies to new-school sensibilities and challenges. For instance, when rebranding in 2013, it sent its design team at DesignStudio on a six-month research trip to study how Airbnb was experienced around the world. The intensive research phase met with skepticism from a digital design world that has grown accustomed to doing research for a project ensconced behind laptops.
In 2014, the brand went a step further, creating an in-house Environments Team responsible for the look and feel of each Airbnb office space. Internal design teams aren’t unheard of, but the trust and importance Airbnb has granted this team is unique. At the group’s helm is husband-and-wife duo Aaron and Rachael Harvey, who, at any given time, are enmeshed in 15 to 20 projects around the globe. Thankfully, we were able to catch up with Aaron in San Francisco, London, and Dublin while Rachael traversed the other side of the world. Here, he talks about what it’s like to manage a 15-person architectural design studio in an over-3,000-employee technology behemoth, and how bringing the digital world to life is trickier than one can imagine.
How it all began
Rachael and I were running our own design studio, Myriad Harbor, in San Francisco in 2013. This was a really interesting time in San Francisco and in particular at Airbnb. They had just embarked on their whole rebrand with DesignStudio and were getting their new headquarters at 888 Brannan Street ready for move in. We were friends with Jenna Cushner, who is the head of what Airbnb calls global ground control, and she was managing the 888 project and I think was just really overwhelmed at the time. So she brought us in to consult on that project.
Airbnb was becoming very attuned to the fact that they weren’t just a digital booking platform but were truly a hospitality company, and they wanted to act like one on every level, including their new offices. How could they make their new space more than just rows and rows of desks? How could they bake their brand into their offices? How could they give their employees a place that they really enjoyed coming to from a physical standpoint?
Airbnb was becoming very attuned to the fact that they weren’t just a digital booking platform but were truly a hospitality company, and they wanted to act like one on every level, including their new offices.
Rachael and I dug in deep to this question, and to get started we proposed “mini-listings” — essentially recreations of online listings in hand-built suitcases that could be packed up and carried on the road anywhere the company needed to visually, and maybe more importantly, tactilely convey exactly what the brand was.
We went to meet with Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky at the old Airbnb headquarters at 99 Rhode Island Street in San Francisco to pitch the idea, and I said to Rachael as soon as we walked in, “This is really cool. We need to be a part of this.”
Our pitch to them was, “Hey, you make a thing that no one can touch and hold. Why don’t you let us make you something that everyone can touch and hold?” They were really into that idea, and they let us build the mini-listings in the office, so that all the employees could see how things were made.
They bought a 3D printer for us to use, and we were on our way. It was four people, working five months to make six models. They were incredibly bespoke. We did all the upholstery. Rachael did all the sewing of the leather. Those mini-listings are really cool and still on display at the 888 Brannan Street headquarters.
In that time, we also created the backdrop for Airbnb’s first global conference in San Francisco — One Airbnb — in February of 2014. Every employee from all over the world came into town for three days of learning and, really, partying and getting to know each other and the new Airbnb brand and direction. Again, we did this all in house, in the basement of 888 Brannan Street, and walked everything across the street where the conference was going to be for the build-out. It was really homegrown and DIY and just super exciting and cool.
From there they asked us to take on their next big office build-out in Portland. We, of course, wanted to do that, but it was complicated handling all the various vendors for a project of that size while being a vendor ourselves. So we said, “Hey, why don’t you just hire us, and we’ll create an in-house design team that can be responsible for all the office build-outs, conferences, fairs, special projects, and whatever else Airbnb needs in the 3D realm? And you should call the department the Environments Team.” They agreed. This was in April of 2014, so it’s been five years now. And since then, we’ve designed 20 offices. In the first two years alone we designed and built 14 offices. It was nuts.
The importance of research
When we first started the Portland project we really came in kind of blind and super open-minded about what an office project like that could be. Airbnb gave us a very broad outline of the problem — “We need a space to hold this many people. You tell us how you want to solve it.” We had a lot to learn, so we spent two weeks in Portland, asking people to show us their favorite parts of the city. We just spent two weeks researching the host city. Thinking back on that, it seems so luxurious, like, “Who has time for that?” But back then, the brand was really not well defined. It was still figuring itself out. So there was a lot of work that needed to be done on every level to define it and get to the core of what that thing is.
Trust your intuition
I don’t fall solidly in the David Kelly camp of design or the Steve Jobs camp. But I probably lean more heavily toward Steve Jobs. I believe you have to trust your gut. If you talk to everyone and give everyone’s voice equal weight during a design project, you will usually come out with network television. You’re going to have yourself an “ER” on your hands. And that’s not the goal.
What you see in the tech world I think is you see a lot of people saying, “Everyone’s voice matters. Everyone’s opinion matters.” And then you have to make some really hard decisions that affect a lot of people and suddenly you are breaking a lot of people’s hearts because you haven’t told them, “Hey, my job as a leader is to hear you, and then make decisions.” So it’s important that people know how things work, and then they don’t feel betrayed.
What we’ve found in our work is that there is a real difference between what people say they want and what they actually do. What you see in all survey situations is that people tend to report their best selves, like, “I work a third of the time standing up.” No one works a third of the time standing up, but a lot of people would like to. So we’ve found you have to moderate the self-reporting with a lot of observation.
Expanding Airbnb
Airbnb is really starting to engage with the user experience, not just digitally but physically, and we are really the only people in the company trained to make that better. Now Airbnb is working with developers who are building properties with Airbnb rentals incorporated into the design.
So what does that look like? And what does that mean in terms of design when a building is not all permanent residents? So we started scheming on that, and we are getting brought in earlier in the process. We want to make those spaces amazing and notably different than walking into some hotel or apartment building.
I think that’s often the challenge in the tech space. Tech companies are often given this leeway to reinvent everything, but in the process, forget about all the things that came before that are not only relevant to what they are doing but necessary to what they are doing.
Airbnb, design educator
At its best, Airbnb’s greatest potential is that it can function as a broad-based design education. It’s a way to teach a lot of people and expose a lot of people all at once to what good design is — the fundamental things that make spaces nice to be in. There is the opportunity to help many, many people to create better spaces.
It’s really about decoupling the style of a space from the performance of a space. You have to figure out how to talk about the phenomenological performance of an environment without the conversation simply becoming, “Oh, it’s Dutch,” or, “It looks like a Parisian loft.” The style cues become so repetitive and, frankly, somewhat unnecessary. What people need are the compositional and space-planning chops. And then hopefully, you might start to see a more eclectic style emerge because people start to have a relatively agnostic set of tools to work with.
I’d love to think that we’re helping non-designers become designers — or at least better DIYers. Really, it’s a selfish goal. I like being in nice spaces. And I think if we give people the tools to create nice spaces, then I will end up being in more nice spaces. We’re not there yet. But that’s the dream.
Magenta is a publication of Huge.
