CHRIS BARRIATUA
Vice President at Henrybuilt
Chris Barriatua
FAME: When was your company founded, and what does it specialize in?
CB: Henrybuilt was founded in 2001. Our primary focus is designing and manufacturing systems of interrelated products for residences, and working with the owners of those projects to apply the systems to their homes. (We are an end-user-focused company.)
Most people know us best for our made-to-order system kitchens, but we also have product families geared toward other areas of the home - dressing rooms, gear rooms, libraries, etc. All under the umbrella of the fact that a traditional “millwork” approach -which is strangely persistent despite being quite archaic compared to the rest of how homes are designed and built - can be replaced by a system approach, and can have an outsized impact on the quality of how the home lives.
There are three companies in our group:
1. Henrybuilt - the parent company of the group - primarily works in the luxury residential space. Mostly product design and manufacturing, with an integrated architecture practice.
2. Space Theory - which leverages technology we’ve developed to produce a simplified version of the Henrybuilt system at a more accessible price point. Killer kitchens, less complexity, less expense.
3. Symbolic Frameworks - a software group, which has built most of the digital underpinnings of our companies’ operational structures, including a visual workflow platform, and a very robust design platform we call our “Design Engine”, which integrates work that’s usually done by disparate groups of people (pricing, engineering, configuration of the product, preparation for production), and brings it all together under one digital “roof”. The Symbolic group has also designed configurator software for a few really great product design companies, to help those teams with scaling and simplifying the front end of their business.
We also publish Untapped, an editorially-independent design journal which focuses on “looking back to look forward” - mining lessons, traditions, and learnings of the past, as a means for advancing how we address the built environment moving forward.
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FAME: Who is Henrybuilt for? (E.g. What kind of clients would find Henrybuilt beneficial?
CB: We have so many different kinds of clients - a really wide range in terms of location, aesthetic orientation, design taste, profession, experience with the building process, etc. And we want the path to working with us to be as open and inclusive as possible. If we zoom all the way out and think about the past 20 years and all those clients (a few thousand folks at this point), the main commonalities across that span would be two things:
1. A desire to really be involved in the design of their home, vs the clients who tell their team to just, “Call when it’s done and ready for me to move in”. We have a few of those projects every year, but I think those clients miss out on a lot of the value we bring to a project. In terms of us really getting a deep understanding of how they live, and then applying our products in a way that responds to - and anticipates through the design of the system - all of those things.
2. A focus on the long run. Clients who are thinking about what the house will be like in 20 years, or 50 years - or what the house will be like when it belongs to their grandchildren - are my favorite. That framework for making decisions, even when the budget is more constrained, yields much better outcomes than things like chasing a trendy photo they saw online.
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FAME: What are the 3 most important things a client should consider when designing a kitchen?
CB: 1. You really want to be careful to not lose yourself amidst the digital noise. There is just so much information and visual stimuli available these days and it can be incredibly derailing.
You need to find ways to discover and develop your own taste and to understand your own ways of working in the space. Get offline, get out into the world.
2. Same topic but “one lane over”: spend the time it takes to really uncover - or create - the spirit of the place. Most old houses have a soul, most new houses do not. Some of that is a product of the lives having been lived in the old house and what that does to a place. But we also see new houses that have it, and when that happens you can tell it’s there because of the way the Architect/Designer structured their thinking.
Point is: take the time, put in the work, to define that spirit - and make that the touchstone for all of the design decisions you make...be sure each decision moves you closer to creating the kind of spirit you want the place to have.
3. Watch value more than price. People spend a lot of money to end up with mediocre outcomes because they put their money into things with watered-down value. For example: is that European kitchen being sold in the “design district” that costs $150K? In reality that is a $25K kitchen that was marked up at four different points in its distribution/resale chain. Wherever you can, buy from the maker.
“If you “design” a kitchen by way of copying Pinterest images and TikTok hacks for functionality, you’re going to have a bad outcome. ”
FAME: What are your top 3 favorite features of Henrybuilt kitchens?
CB: 1. For me the best thing - far and away - is the durability and the way the product gets better and better as you use it, and with age. Somehow the world went from “luxury products” being the ones that were expensive because they would last forever, to now being the ones with the most logos...we are trying to push things back to the old-school version. Artful tools, deep beauty, lasting value.
2. This answer is a bit of a cheat, but #2 would be the breadth of the offering and the ability to really make the system whatever you want, in terms of the overall aesthetic. You can play so much with the “outside” of the system to adapt it....it’s analogous to fashion in some ways.
The product can recede and be a “white t-shirt” in the room, or you can embellish more and make it the Dries van Noten piece that’s stealing the show visually...or you can go all dark and textural and play with proportion and make it a Rick Owens Neo-goth-lux thing...it’s incredibly flexible.
3. The vertical bar block is pretty great.
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FAME: How does your pricing compare to a custom kitchen?
CB: Unfortunately, this is basically impossible to answer - only because “custom” is not a quality level, it’s a way of working. It just means you can change everything, which (strangely) has been romanticized into a false superiority vs a more product-driven approach.
It’s funny...think about any other complex thing a person buys - computers, cars, etc -do you really want to be able to “change everything”? How’s that going to work out? And as a result, there are just so many “fully custom” kitchens that are built with a high price tag, but at a very low-quality level, and an even lower level of performance/function. So it’s tough to compare. But I will say that in 20+ years, I’ve never seen pricing from a custom shop that was lower than ours - for a comparable build quality.
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FAME: Modular kitchens often present limits in options, how does Henrybuilt meet this challenge?
CB: I’m glad you asked this because it’s probably the most misunderstood thing with our kitchens. Henrybuilt kitchens are not modular. There is a deep platform of engineering and industrial design underpinning the system, but every kitchen is designed and built to order, and fully tailored into the space. We are not working off-set sizes.
The areas of the system where we do have constraints, dimensional or otherwise, they’re really there to support the outcome. There is a big difference between “Can you make something”, and “Should you make something”, and we only care about the “should” (whereas the custom millwork mindset is more about “can it be made”, and often no one is really looking out for the client in that conversation).
FAME: If a client wants to use Henrybuilt, but they have their own architect or designer, will you work with them? How does the process and relationship with the architect/designer work?
CB: Of course! Almost all of our clients have an Architect or Designer, and most of our clients have both.
In service of that, one thing we always do when we’re starting a new project is to have a separate conversation with the Architecture/Design team about their priorities and goals - what needs to happen from their perspective in order for the project to be successful, what are the key ideas/elements present in their work that our work needs to support, etc.
It took a while for us to be able to see this clearly, but on so many of our projects, the HB scope ends up building a really nice physical bridge between the bigger-picture ideas of the architecture, and the lives that get lived within those spaces. The system becomes a connector between space and hand, in a way that kinda just makes this magical thing happen. And the stronger the architecture, the more magical. We feel really lucky to get to work with the people we do in the A&D world, and we hope to keep that going for a very long time.
Side note, but related: it’s such a fantastic time right now for the industry in terms of new emerging firms. We are seeing so many talented architects and designers - who were previously at a big established firm - stepping out to start their own thing. Some amazing projects coming across our desks from those groups. It bodes well for the next generation of the scene - the future is bright!
“Roughly half of our business comes from clients who are referred to us by their Architect or Designer.
Being a great partner to every team member is a top-level company priority for us.”
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FAME: Share a 'fun fact' about Henrybuilt
CB: Hmm...I don’t know if this counts as a fun fact but one thing people are always surprised by how much work we do with Architects who are building (or in some cases renovating) their own homes.
There’s a funny irony because some clients think there might be too much overlap between us and their architect, but after a few decades of residential practice, most architects see that designing a great kitchen really is a different discipline, and they want a specialist when it comes time for their own home. I’ll always remember a conversation I had with one of the principals of a successful LA-based architecture firm, who was considering working with us to design his kitchen and other functional areas of the house.
I asked him how he was thinking about the Henrybuilt idea relative to just having a millworker build something he would design. He said, “I know lots of skilled millworkers but they are basically like butchers - they will cut things exactly how you tell them to - but I want a chef, who can see the whole picture of the kitchen and make it all come together”.
That comment has stuck with me (for - I think - 17 years?), and I think it was prescient in terms of him anticipating that more and more people would come to see their kitchen as “one thing”, vs a collection of parts and pieces - and that a more holistic design approach would be the future of this kind of work.