If you’ve ever eaten at Mabel’s BBQ, met a friend at the Van Aken Market Hall, spent a mini vacation at Castaway Bay or played away the afternoon at the Children’s Museum of Cleveland, you’ve experienced the interior design work of Scott Richardson and his firm. For 30 years, Richardson Design has left its mark on many of the area’s most popular restaurants, hotels, homes and offices.
The work of Richardson and his colleagues extends far beyond Ohio’s borders, but it’s noteworthy how many of the area’s high-profile destinations are featured in the firm’s portfolio. Great Lakes Brewing Co., the Crowne Plaza Cleveland hotel at Playhouse Square, Aladdin’s Eatery, Boaz Fresh Lebanese, Boom’s Pizza, Bomba Tacos, Klutch Cannabis dispensaries, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s offices, AdCom, Sawmill Creek Resort and Tony Packo’s Restaurant all count the firm as clients. The firm has designed food stations for the Browns, the Guardians and the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. There are entire apartment buildings and many individual homes in the area that feel modern and chic, thanks to the firm’s efforts. From startups to billion-dollar corporations, Richardson Design takes them all on.
I would like to describe for you here what a typical Richardson designed space looks and feels like, but they all look and feel pretty different. Mabel’s BBQ heralds the age of industrial-chic restaurants, with steel lighting beams, heavy wood tables, brick walls and the distinct feeling that you’re about to eat a lot of meat. Castaway Bay, geared at families on a quick getaway, is saturated in bright turquoise and shades of happy green. Smiling sloths and flamingos and fish traverse the walls of the hotel rooms while a fake beach with fake palm trees tries to help you forget it’s probably snowing outside. The latest Klutch Cannabis dispensary, set to open on East Fourth Street, is in the original space of Record Rendezvous, so the design has a “record shop vibe,” though you won’t be able to buy any records. The Children’s Museum is an immense and airy indoor playground where kids can mess around in water features in one room and put on plays in another. The original Antonio’s Pizzeria in Parma, which the firm is redesigning, is going for a nostalgic feel with cozy tables, gilded wallpaper and leather seats. The renderings are more mob wife than mobster: plenty of rich textures and pasta, no smoking or crime.
All of these spaces are distinct, and that’s by design.
“We don’t have a style to our firm, to our design, like a lot of places, a lot of other firms I feel do,” Richardson says. “Our projects look the way they do because of who our client is, and who their customer is, and the unique features of that project. It’s not about us. It’s about them.”
While the firm takes on all sorts of clients, they do have one unified goal for what all of their end products should be. That ideal is emblazoned in unmissable black lettering on a large wall just inside the offices of their headquarters on West Sixth Street: “creating the places where you want to be.”
“That really defines the type of projects we do,” Richardson says. “Places where people want to be — so restaurants, hotels. We do a lot of sports work, stadium and arena work, cultural attractions, zoos. We do some very high-end residential work.”
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I wanted to get a sense of what Richardson is like at work, so I asked to tag along on a couple meetings or site visits, but it turns out that interior design work is much more secretive than I realized. Most of the projects the company had in the works were blocked off from me by non-disclosure agreements.
My plan B was to ask Richardson to meet me at one of his all-time favorite projects. He chose the Van Aken Market Hall in Shaker Heights.
We met up on a warm spring morning. The place was bustling with folks grabbing coffee, meeting old friends and typing furiously on laptops. Kids bounced around while moms perused the small shops. As soon as he got there, Richardson bumped into a friend from the Entrepreneurs Organization, a nonprofit that supports business owners under 40. All the hustle and bustle of the place is a sign that it’s “doing exactly what it was supposed to do,” he says.
There was a bit of construction going on toward the back, where Richardson Design had put a small stage-like area with steps leading up to it. He doesn’t know what they’re working on there, and he doesn’t mind.
Richardson initially attended the Cleveland Institute of Art to be a photographer but found that interior design intrigued him more.
“I think it was being creative, but being able to do things at a scale that you’re inside of,” he says.
After graduating, he got a job at a firm in Columbus, but it didn’t take long for him to realize he’d like to strike out on his own. Together with his wife, Jill Richardson, they decided to move back up to Cleveland in 1994. But starting your own firm isn’t easy.
“He literally bought a mailing list of architecture firms around the country, and we printed postcards with some of his renderings on the postcards,” Jill recalls about those early days. “He mailed those postcards to every architecture firm that he could find in New York City, and he had one guy reach out to him. And we still work with him today.”
What attracted him to the medium was the longer life of interior design. Interiors are not disposable the way items or even cars are.
Still, 30 years worth of design work has meant that many of the restaurants he’s worked on have closed, such as Michael Symon’s B-Spot burger joints. Others have gotten new names and looks, like the restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton Cleveland, Turn Bar & Kitchen. Hotels have been renovated, offices have closed, and sports stadiums are prone to overhauls and occasionally big moves. At the Van Aken Market Hall, many of the stands have changed owners over the years. Interior design trends change, as do the needs of clients. He’s used to it by now.
Nevertheless, six years after its grand opening, the Van Aken Market Hall is as popular as ever.
“We love to create places where you want to be, and this embodies that because people want to be here,” he
says. “This place fosters interaction. It fosters business growth. Look at all the different people here having fun and
enjoying it. There was nowhere for them to do it before. We created it.”
Should it need a renovation at some point in the future, Richardson — or at least Richardson Design — will be available for hire.
I don’t say this because he’s planning on retiring — he dislikes the word and bristles at the notion. But, spending a bit of time with him in and out of the office, one gets the sense that Richardson Design is a little bit less about Scott these days and increasingly about the pool of younger talent that he has mentored, taught and hired over the years. Take, for instance, his wife Jill’s response when I asked her to describe her husband’s design style.
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“I don’t want this to all be about Scott, because, yeah, he is Cleveland born and bred, but all the work comes out of these people that are sitting in front of us,” she says, glancing out her office at the staff. Jill is the director of finance and business operations, overseeing the financial well-being of Richardson Design and its 16 employees.
“We have design directors who, on a daily basis, are the ones who are managing and overseeing these projects,” she adds, “and so the kudos to them, because they are definitely the driving force these days.”
She was more eager to elucidate me on his management style, one of fostering creativity, mentoring and guiding designers through projects. He spent 15 years as an adjunct professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art, and the teaching never fully left him. Some of his former students are now his employees.
The firm’s interior design director, Tracy Van Der Kuil, started working with the company as a consultant and ended up joining full-time over a decade ago.
“It was just nice to be nurtured and to be developed and to be appreciated, and respected, and you definitely feel like you’re part of the team here,” she says. “It’s an extended family. There’s a very strong culture here to be part of each other’s family or to be part of each other’s life or to be interested in one another’s life outside of the office space, as well.”
While visiting Richardson at his office, a sleek and modern space with an open design surrounded by glass-walled offices and meeting spaces, we noticed a group of young employees head out for coffee. He says that’s typical, a sign of both the convenient Downtown placement of the office and the congeniality among his employees.
That friendly work environment is one reason Richardson says he is reluctant to hire and fire, opting instead for maximum stability.
“I know too many design firms that staff up and then lay off, and then staff up and then lay off, and I’m not going to be that,” he says.
He had to lay people off during the pandemic, which he described as “terrible” and “gut-wrenching.” He’s also had to let go of some employees who he says didn’t “fit” with the company. He dislikes big egos.
RELATED: The I-X Center is Going to Be Repurposed As A Data Center“You learn from that, and so now I’m very much slow to hire,” he says. “It has to be the right person, the right fit, because I feel responsible for them.”
He tries to hire people for the long term, like Kristie Oldham, the company’s partner and chief operating officer. The two first met when she worked for an architecture company, and they collaborated on a few projects 25 years ago. She joined Richardson Design full-time 18 years ago. Oldham says she’s able to work well with Richardson because their skill sets are complementary.
“As one idea might be a little large, I may reel it in,” she says. “Where the opposite, I may not be thinking enough outside of the box and Scott’s coming in and pushing that.”
Oldham oversees the half-dozen or so projects the firm has going on at any given moment, from small projects with a week-long turnaround to major projects that can take years. That includes one project where the firm is working on an addition to an office space they initially designed 13 years ago — an undertaking that she’s particularly tickled by.
“It was a pretty proud moment to walk through that space,” she says. “[It’s] just kind of good to hear, even from the newer employees, how they really love their office and they like the openness, they like the privacy that they can get and how it works really well for their teams and how they work.”
She couldn’t tell me which office it is though, because of the NDAs.
While Oldham was brainstorming ways to update that particular office project, Richardson flew off to Mexico with Jill to work on Casa Vista Pastora, an investment property they’re turning into an AirBnB. The white walls of the house contrast nicely with the dark green of the cacti and palm trees by the heated pool outside. Inside the beige concrete walls you’ll find a hand-painted tile backsplash, custom beds, and an open-air rooftop with a firepit. I ask if he’ll also be spending some vacation days there once it’s complete.
“I mean, I would, but when I stay there, I don’t make any money,” he tells me.
Though he prides himself on his creative work, the years of running a business have clearly rubbed off on him.
That’s what happens over the course of three decades. He started out as a one-man shop, mailing out postcards of his drawings to a list of firms his wife put together from the phone book. Now his firm touts massive clients, like Aramark, alongside its loyal roster of local clients.
Still, he tells me, one thing never changes.
“I’ll always be an artist that sits and draws,” he says.
He still hand-draws renderings for clients. He never got used to computer based renderings, calling himself a “dinosaur.” That’s how he imagines life when he “moves on to something.”
One former collaborator and longtime friend of his, architect John Williams, hired him as an artist to design his annual Christmas card years ago, back when the two shared office space. The card featured a triptych of their Ohio City studio and Williams’s dogs peeking out one of the windows.
Williams says that despite his training as an architect, Richardson was always more of the artist between them.
“Scott and I would always laugh about how we would get together for a meeting and talk about things, and I’d have notes on paper, and he would have drawings,” he says.
The two shared that office space and sometimes clients for about a decade. Clients liked to visit them at their studio because their dogs were always there, and nothing makes a long meeting more palatable than pets. Together, they designed the former Century restaurant in the Ritz Carlton, for instance. In fact, it was while they were headed to a presentation for a joint project that they discovered their relationship actually goes back to childhood, when Williams was Richardson’s summer camp counselor.
“There is a kismet there that we would cross paths again so many years later and have such a good friendship and such a good working relationship,” Williams tells me.
Even friends who didn’t start out as coworkers end up collaborating with Richardson sometimes.
Industrial designer Dan Cuffaro attended the Cleveland Institute of Art with Richardson, and the two have maintained a close relationship over the years. When Cuffaro moved back to the Cleveland area after years of working in Boston to teach at CIA, one of his new hobbies became biking around town with Richardson and coming up with plans to improve the city. Sometimes, these expeditions were inspired by design competitions, like the time they came up with a proposal for a Cleveland lakefront master plan sponsored by The Plain Dealer and Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative. Other times, though, they just did it for fun, like when they created and submitted an unsolicited proposal to revamp Lakewood’s downtown. Their plans don’t tend to come to fruition, but that’s not really the point.
“Scott’s almost like family. There’s just a lot of honesty. He’s really straightforward,” Cuffaro told me. “I’ll get all worked up, and Scott just is like smooth sailing. It’s really easy for him, if I’m getting worked up, to redirect towards a productive outcome.”
At one point when we first met, it almost sounded like Richardson was about to complain about a finicky client, but he quickly pivoted to saying it’s all just part of the job and no big deal.
The work can be stressful. He has to juggle the temperaments of clients, make sure projects run smoothly and on time, coordinate with architects and builders, and manage his own firm. Still, he likes to remind his employees that at the end of the day, it’s not all that serious.
“These are first world problems,” he says. “We’re designing for people to unwind and have a good time, and you’ve just got to kind of keep that in perspective. What we’re designing is not mission-critical to the future of the world. But it’s important to us as artists.”
Not all projects win awards, though some do, as a colorful row of them at their offices will attest. Either way, word has been spreading about the firm. Jill estimates that 95% of the company’s projects come through word of mouth or referrals. People are catching on outside of Northeast Ohio, too; it was recently named one of Interior Design magazine’s “Rising Giants,” the smallest firm on the list (measured in design fees) to make the cut.
Particularly important to him is when the firm can take on smaller clients. As a former startup, Richardson has a soft spot for working with individuals who are setting out on their own for the first time, like a chef opening their first restaurant.
“You can make a much bigger impact on the life of someone who’s sort of a startup,” he says. “Might not win a design award, but it’s meaningful.”
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