The Architect as an archetype in our pop-cultural imagination is often painted as a severe, even obsessive figure. Whether real (the late Frank Gehry comes to mind) or fictive (think The Brutalist), we are so often encouraged to think of architects and designers in terms of an immediately recognizable sensibility which characterizes their oeuvre. The Architect has an uncompromising vision of the future.

“But what does it really mean to build a platform for the future?” Andre Herrero asks rhetorically from outside his firm’s Los Angeles studio in Historic Filipinotown. He and Adam Charlap Hyman, the two principals of their eponymous firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero, seem to favor an approach that’s more chameleonic. Still both shy of 40 and the recent recipients of a 2026 National Design Award—an honor bestowed upon architects and designers at the height of their profession—it seems the future is theirs for the shaping.

It is perhaps a lack of aesthetic calling card that contributes to their work’s omnipresence—from Joshua Tree homes to Lower East Side storefronts and performances sets for the Cincinnati Opera. After 12 years, their “multi-disciplinary startup,” as Herrero wryly describes their practice, only continues to expand.

The pair’s environments can emerge intimately: in the delicately charged conversation between antiquity and modernity, across monochromatic rooms cast in rich textural variety. (“We find a lot of poetry,” says Charlap Hyman, “in certain tensions between old and new, soft and hard, [and] across proportions and scales”). Or they can unfold dramatically, monolithic and vast with a Turrell-via-Caravaggio sensibility around light and shadow.

This is not, however, to say they want for singular vision. Creators of ground-up structures, custom textiles, and most things in between, both Charlap Hyman and Herrero are, like many of their well-known forebearers in their fields, committed to a holistic vision of gesamtkunstwerk. “[Our favorite projects],” admits Charlap Hyman, “[are ones] in which we’ve designed the building, the landscape, new furniture, found the antiques, commissioned artists to do the fabrics or the work on the walls.” 

But whether in environs wholly of their own making or integrated into a larger whole, their work uniformly meets each place and moment instead of finding itself prisoner to The Moment. It intervenes without overwhelming. Herrero explains: “We’ve never tried to be trendy or fashionable. It’s about solving [the puzzle of each] project.” He extols the virtue of focusing on a site’s specificities—location, function, client, budget—and letting aesthetics emerge naturally from these considerations. Charlap Hyman explains this ethos another way from firm’s sunlit Midtown studio: “Our [favorite moments are] finding those ties between things that seem to transcend aesthetics and instead become about a history, person, or place.” 

It is perhaps the particular chemistry of their creative partnership, active since their days together as undergraduates at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), that allows these site-specific interventions to speak so clearly. Fewer people seem better poised than Charlap Hyman, who helms the interior design side of the firm’s practice to harmonize discrete aesthetics in service of a new moment. He is a font of design and art-historical references, explaining excitedly why the postwar Modernist furniture of Luigi Caccia Dominioni feels at home in a recent renovation of Gothic Revival apartment. And balancing his rigorously informed historical rigor, there is a boldness that recalls Iris Apfel (a Greenwich Village loft saw him place 70s Brutalist chairs alongside alongside a newly commissioned aluminum table). Herrero, meanwhile, attributes a synthesis of his reference points which result in “forms, abstractions, and solutions to formal questions that are so fresh to the eye.” 

The result is a novelty which feels alternately alien and familiar: a SoHo loft that shimmers with a calm eclecticism, a Silverlake renovation whose verdant greens and yellows seem to cascade in with the natural light instead of originating in the paint on the walls, a bedroom clad all in cork which evokes Proust’s famous writing room. It’s a tension, alternately dramatic and playful, which is almost kinetic. “We’re often trying to evoke a feeling of [déjà vu]…when really, it is a new [assemblage] of elements,” Charlap Hyman remarks. “That uncanny sense…is a triumph for us.” 

This quiet innovation which backgrounds ego is, in many ways, the antithesis of what we have come to expect from the figure of the Architect speaking with a singular and distinctive voice. 

But the history of architecture is littered with the grand, overarching plans of visionaries for futures gone unrealized. Futures that prove sustainable, meanwhile, are deeply rooted in variety of place and purpose, kaleidoscopic, multitudinous. They require adaptability, an embrace of the alchemy of dialogue—between creative collaborators, aesthetic registers, and shared histories. Few firms today seem as comfortable as Charlap Hyman & Herrero in this space of pluralism and breadth. And few firms are better poised to define our collective futures.

Andre Herrero:

Photographed by Jonathan Hedrick 

Styled by Jai Simmons 

Grooming: Jessie Yarborough at Celestine Agency

DP: Sophie Saunders

Flaunt Film Editor: Daniel Quintero 

Stylist Assistant: Max Mendieta 

Adam Charlap Hyman:

Photographed by Alvin Kean Wong

Styled by Dylan Wayne

Grooming: Regina Harris

Flaunt Film Editor: Daniel Quintero