Emily & Archie
Photography by Ryan Patterson
Interviewed at their home in Brooklyn, with their cat Akiva. Both designers by trade, Archie Coates owns Playlab and is also building a giant Plus Pool in the East River. Emily Coates is Old Souls, and together they occasionally host Eat With Neighbor.
TWP: What is a typical day?
ARCHIE: For both of us?
TWP: Mm-hmm.
EMILY: Archie gets up and leaves as quick as he can.
ARCHIE: There are a lot of things that she’s realizing over time about me. Since we’re made for each other and all that, it’s perfect. But, there are things that we have to adapt to as work gets crazier or New York gets crazier. And one of those is that I cannot work past three very well. And my nights are fucked. So I have to work as early as I can. And, the less I drink to be healthier so I can run and do all those things, the earlier I go to bed and the earlier I wake up. I want to wake up and as soon as I fucking wake up I want to get out the door. Maybe I’ll make coffee and answer some emails, but I want to get out of the door and in my studio, which is my haven. I can’t work in here. I can paint in here and I can draw in here, I can make records in here, but I cannot design in here and I can’t manage projects in here. I just don’t believe in it. So I try to get out. She wants -- she believes in this European like get up and have breakfast together and read the paper together.
EMILY: Yeah! Exactly!
ARCHIE: Which is like, I want it too --
TWP: But I’m not being productive.
EMILY: But his mind is already turned on, right?
ARCHIE: Yeah, my mind’s on and I got to go. I come home -- when she moved to New York she basically gave me an ultimatum -- not an ultimatum. But she said, “You have to fucking be home for dinner.” -- before she moved to New York I was at the studio, Jonathan had the studio with me. We would be up all hours of the night, all the time. We never left that studio. Famous story. The bathroom didn’t work in our studio for a very long time. Jonathan shit in a box. The point being, I love building things. I love making things. So whatever it is that we’re interested in at the time is what we should be doing -- but I want to make a record after record after record. I want to make paintings that might make somebody just rethink something.
Since we’re made for each other and all that, it’s perfect. But, there are things that we have to adapt to as work gets crazier and New York gets crazier.
ARCHIE: There is a single point in time when I watched the Louis Kahn documentary and thought, “I never want to fucking be like that guy ever.” And my answer was to quit architecture when I was 19. And so I did. I do not want to be a guy that dies alone in New York Penn Station, and nobody finds his body for four days, and he has three separate families in three different states because he couldn’t get his shit together to figure out why he should spread his seed into one woman, not versus another, and do that three times over. Yet wait ‘til he’s 70-years-old to make the best fucking buildings of his life. And he’s still broke and in $500,000 of debt. I never want to be that person, no matter how beautiful the Salk Institute is, no matter how beautiful those buildings in India are, I will never be that person. I would rather build a birdhouse that was as tight as that, than end up like that motherfucker. Was he a great architect? Sure, but that’s what happened with me in architecture school and I had that adverse reaction. And, when I fell in love with her I was like, “I will marry you and I will fucking have the best life with you for the rest of my life until I’m in the ground.” And that’s totally, totally how it’s going to play out. You can quote me on that, for real.
I will marry you and I will fucking have the best life with you for the rest of my life until I’m in the ground.
ARCHIE: Your world is so small in New York that if you fuck with one person and step out of line, it’ll come back to you and you’re fucked and you’re done. You have to leave the city. Because this city, as much as it chews you up and spits you out, you have to be so good to it! And good to the people that you meet. Because you never know what that business will end up doing!
We built our lives around each other, we’ve grown into the people that we are today.
I’ve never been one to plan out life or think: Oh, this is what my life will be like, this is what I’m going to plan. I never really thought about it. I just lived life. But I can’t imagine it any other way now.
Living the way that we do.
EMILY: We built our lives, you know, around each other. We’ve grown into the people that we are today and I’ve never been one to plan out life or think: oh, this is what my life will be like. This is what I’m going to plan, right? I never really thought about it. I just lived life. But I can’t imagine it any other way now, you know? Living the way that we do. You do have to work on it, we’re always working all the time and always have to stop each other.
ARCHIE: It’s cool. It’s the way I want it. It’s the way we want it, for sure. Because you could work forever.
EMILY: I could work forever.
ARCHIE: You could work forever.
It’s OK, I don’t need to get everything done today.
EMILY: Archie and I, during the day don’t work together on the stuff we do, but we do Eat With Neighbor together and we do things together. But it’s just finding the time. And that’s the thing, it’s like the two pinnacles in my mind, as a designer and an artist, are fashion and film. I’d like to go full force towards both of those.
ARCHIE: And for them all to be together. We’re also having this like newfound realization that there’s so much time and people are living longer --
EMILY: We could do it later, you know?
ARCHIE: We’re not going to stop working ever, so it’s like the longevity is 100. We’re a quarter of the way through. We’ve got a long time to do -- And the longer you go, the slower -- it’s OK, I don’t need to get everything done today.
On love
ARCHIE: It was completely accidental in the sense that, it was one of those classic stories where like I was obsessed with her when I was 21-years-old. And I wanted to fucking make love to her forever.
ARCHIE: You know? And, I just fell in love with her. That’s it. That was it. And I knew that that would be it forever. And she found out at the time that she was in love with me as well. But she didn’t really know -- she didn’t know everything about me until it unfolded. And then she started changing as a person, I started changing as a person. But us as a unit is way more powerful than not.
On work
TWP: One artist called it deep-sea diving. He was like, you have to schedule your deep-sea diving time.
ARCHIE: Yeah, and we schedule our playtime and our playtime is tight. And I’ll get emails from her in the middle of the day that are, “I was just thinking about us and, you know, that this, this is the most amazing thing that I could ever imagine our life looking like,” you know? I mean this is it. This is it. This is what perfect life looks like.
But us as a unit is way more powerful than not.
It’s all in the details
ARCHIE: We got in a fight this morning. But the fight was on -- over I woke up like --
EMILY: You woke up on the wrong side of the bed, for sure.
ARCHIE: No, I woke up on the right side of the bed. This was the argument.
EMILY: (laughs)
ARCHIE: I’m launching this huge part of this project for a project that I’m working on with my friends. And it’s consumed my life, in a good way. But it’s all that I think about. I woke up this morning and I was only thinking about that. Emily was like, “I want to go walk to Marlow and get granola,” because we didn’t have granola.
EMILY: We didn’t have granola.
ARCHIE: And I said, “OK, you go. I want to be in the house by myself and do the laundry and get ready and whatever.”
TWP: Right.
ARCHIE: And she said, “Oh.” And then I was like (sighs) --
TWP: She wants me to go with her.
ARCHIE: -- “I’m going to go get dressed and I’ll go with you.” She’s like, “OK great.” And we start walking, she’s like, “What’s wrong with you?” I said, “Nothing’s wrong with me. I’m fine. I’m fine.” And then we go to Marlo, there’s no granola, so we go to the deli to get granola. We’re walking back, she’s like, “What’s wrong with you?” I keep saying, “Everything’s fine! Stop asking me! Just thinking about this project.” And then she was like, “What can I do to help with this project?” you know. I think, oh my God. Right, I don’t have to share that burden, which is a good burden, it’s a creative burden. But even when I’m painting I stress over each line that I draw. And she’ll sit there and help me theorize about why I should make another mark.
ARCHIE: You have to present the best version of yourself as much as you can. I think in a perfect world I would definitely be a lot more conscious of her and us every second. And I constantly strive for that. But I know that the advantage to our relationship is -- which is so tight -- is that we have a higher standard to that tightness. So that when we fall back on a less tightness it’s already way superior, in the sense that she, she knows me 100%, I know her 100%. Sometimes you have to let each other go. I don’t know why it works and I don’t want to fuck it up.
(laughter)
EMILY: No, I think that’s it, yeah.
TWP: It works. Did it always work or did it take work to make it work?
EMILY: No, it took a ton of work.
ARCHIE: It took a ton of work, but it always worked to some degree. You build up to a point where you -- mean I guess can marry, and that’s when everything gets hog-wild and crazy.