Credited with having pioneered the profession of ‘restaurant designer’ back in the early 1980s, Adam D. Tihany is, to his clients at least, both designer and architect, brand consultant and aesthetic muse.
In South Africa for the opening of his latest project, One&Only Cape Town, he has already been spotted dining out at several of the city’s latest eateries before we are formally introduced in the lobby of Sol Kerzner’s grandiose 131-room property.

Effortlessly dressed down in a white linen trouser suit and tee-shirt combo, he could almost pass for a visiting sightseer were it not for the reassuringly large Patek Philippe protruding proudly from his wrist. And the fact that he is greeted by no fewer than three hotel guests in the 30-second walk from lobby to outside café table.
Our choice of table, it turns out, is to be both curse and blessing. Born in Transylvania, raised in Israel and schooled at the Politecnico di Milano, Tihany moved to New York City in 1976 and it is there that he found his spiritual home. Today he is an incorrigible networker, like many in Manhattan, and we are repeatedly forced to interrupt our chat as he rises to greet another visiting VIP.

A sprightly sexagenarian, Tihany is clearly enjoying the golden years of his career and can now look back on his early creative development with a certain candour.
“I studied urban architecture and design in Milano but work was really thin on the ground in Europe at that time so we had to make do with whatever projects we could find. When I later moved to the US and people asked me what I specialised in, I’d say ‘I can do anything, just show me the problem and I’ll design something!’ But that didn’t go down well at all...”
Lean times were to continue until a seminal project in the early 1980s that saw Tihany mastermind the interiors of La Coupole in New York, his first major restaurant project.
“It was a 250-seater grand café with a strong design element, something New York had never seen before. We opened in the midst of a heavy snow storm yet the lines were around the block on day one, even Andy Warhol couldn’t get in.”
Building upon his diverse range of experiences in Italy, this assignment revealed a rare agility that allowed the designer to tackle architecture, interiors, furniture, lighting, even the plates on the restaurant tables with equal dexterity.
“The very next day I went out and bought myself a sign that said ‘Adam D. Tihany, Restaurant Designer’ and that moment, as far as I know, was the birth of the entire profession.”
Restaurant work soon morphed into a more generalist ‘hospitality design’ focus to include bars, clubs and, perhaps most pertinently, hotels. Tihany Design now has offices in New York and Rome, with a client list that reads like a roll call of the sector’s pre-eminent names; Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Thomas Keller, Mandarin Oriental, Shangri-La and One&Only, to name but a few.
Other hotel projects currently on the drawing boards include a redesign of the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park London; and a restaurant, bar / lounge and observation deck on the upper floors of the Shangri La Beijing at the China World Trade Centre.

To say that his practice can afford to turn away good work in the current climate would be overkill, yet there is a definite sense of Tihany having reached a point in his life when artistic sensibilities take priority over a slavish responsibility to the bottom line. In the hotel sphere for example, projects without allowances for a generous site-specific design element are unlikely to make it past the office manager’s inbox.

“I told Sol that my involvement in One&Only Cape Town was dependent on us looking for a voice for Cape Town’s very own aesthetic; although ironically, that turned out to be a rather elusive concept in the end.” Through collaboration with SA Tourism offices around the world and a number of face-to-face interviews with Cape Town-based opinion-formers, Tihany and his team eventually reached the difficult conclusion that an explicitly Capetonian aesthetic simply did not exist. “There is just no such animal, for every person we spoke to it meant something different!” The way out of this creative corner was to come at the problem from the hotel guest’s perspective instead of a local’s. This nifty side step therefore entailed treading a tightrope between Africanesque pastiche on the one hand and generic ‘Hiltonitis’ on the other.

Despite numerous references in the official One&Only literature to ‘African-inspired’ design elements, when pushed on this relationship between a generic ‘African’ descriptor for his inspiration here and the geographically more precise ‘Capetonian’ option, Tihany is resolutely in favour of the latter.
“This city can be incredibly windy at certain times of year and that prompted me to create the intricate glass chandelier hanging in the hotel lobby. Similarly, the main restaurant’s three-storey, 5000 bottle wine loft pays homage to the Cape winelands. Then of course you have the locally bought fabrics, the locally made furniture, the local art and so on.”
Never one to shy away from even the thorniest of issues, Tihany boldy opens up a discussion on authenticity in design, a topic that must have caused many a sleepless night in studios around the globalised world.

“Authenticity is the hardest sell in the business, what really matters in my opinion is perception. If you set out to define the ‘authentic’ aesthetic experience in any one place, you are destined to fail because you simply can’t satisfy everybody; that level of subjectivity is one of the most challenging ideas for any designer to incorporate into their work...”
And with that, he’s off. Sol Kerzner can be seen gesticulating angrily by the pool and Adam’s presence is urgently requested. Mentally swapping his philosopher’s cap for that of trusted counsel, a knowing wink draws our discussion to an end; despite all our talk of relativity, he seems to be saying, some opinions still count more than others.