Alon Baranowitz and Irene Kronenberg at W Hotel in Amsterdam. Photography by Kasia Gatkowska
When two storytellers join forces, there’s often a rapid-fire confluence of shared ideas and creative expression. Such is the case for Irene Kronenberg and Alon Baranowitz, married co-founders of the eponymous design studio founded in 1999. They have collaborated on projects including the MR PORTER restaurant brand with sites in London, Barcelona and Amsterdam; THE DUCHESS restaurant in Amsterdam; W Hotels in Amsterdam and Ibiza; and most recently, THE CUBE in London’s Canary Wharf.
In what ways does your partnership shape a storytelling approach to your work?
We live in a time where information surrounds us in overwhelming quantities; we often spend more time filtering it than truly absorbing it. Facts alone can feel dry, complex or fragmented and rarely hold the depth of an experience. As philosopher Walter Benjamin once observed, information can evaporate the moment it enters the world. This is where storytelling begins. A story takes information and gives it an emotional frame and a wider context. In this sense, storytelling gathers scattered fragments of information and gives them shape, restoring proportion, perspective and human meaning. Through this quiet transformation, information gains resonance. The story, one might say, becomes its soul.
THE CUBE, Canary Wharf
What makes your studio’s design philosophy unique?
Context, or what architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz described as the essence of place, remains our guiding light. Every project responds to its culture, its location and the audience it hopes to welcome. We follow these insights closely and allow them to guide us. In many ways, the story is already there, quietly waiting. Our role is simply to edit it and ensure it engages people in a way that feels both natural and memorable.
How do you balance your personal and professional lives?
We do not. For us, work and life have never been separate territories. They exist within the same landscape. Designing together and living together creates a rhythm that is deeply intertwined, multifaceted, sometimes complex and at other moments strikingly clear. Conversations about a project may begin at the studio table and continue over dinner, or while walking down the street. It carries everything a shared life does, with moments of sweetness and friction, clarity alongside doubt. Yet throughout it all runs a quiet sense of purpose.
MR PORTER London. Photography by Stevie Campbell
This or That
WORK MODE: PEACEFUL, DARK-TONED SANCTUARY OR LIGHT, BRIGHT ATMOSPHERE? We are Mediterranean people, sun people. Sunlight for us is a state of mind. The sun is not merely something we live under. It is something we design with.
UNDERFOOT: PLUSH OR POLISHED SURFACES? We are drawn to concrete flooring. In many ways, it embodies the Mediterranean spirit itself: modest, resilient and quietly beautiful in the way it evolves with time.
COUPLE TIME: GYM WORKOUT OR SPA TREATMENT? Our idea of time well spent is far simpler. A good book, a glass of excellent wine and a piece of jazz playing softly in the background. Nothing surpasses that quiet companionship.
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