Jordan Mozer, who has been described as “the boy Wunderkind of architecture” and the “designer with the Midas touch,” is sitting in a booth, pencil stuck behind one ear, munching on a piece of crusty bread.
“Are you hungry?” he asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer as he points around Vivere, the busy Italian restaurant in the Loop he transformed from the old Florentine Room a few years ago. “See the columns, they’re spirals. The spiral expresses the family that owns this restaurant, all the generations involved. And, it also comes from baroque Italian architecture, which is something I love. Part of it comes from an experience I had when I was 13, I was in the Sistine Chapel . . . and another thing, Chicago is a very new place, it burned down and was rebuilt but it’s a classical modernness.
He pauses. “I’m a non-linear thinker,” he says. “Sorry, I know I’m hard to follow sometimes.”
Mozer, single and 34, is hot and getting hotter. His fame and design have spread way beyond Chicago (Cairo, Scoozi and Vivere, and collaborative work on many others, including Baja Beach Club, California Pizza Kitchen, Shaw’s Blue Crab) to swinging restaurants and nightclubs in Houston, San Francisco, Japan and Germany. Altogether, he’s got about 50 restaurants under his design belt, and that number grows monthly.
“He’s wildly creative,” says Rich Melman, head of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, the mega-restaurant chain. “He’s very talented, very dramatic and very visual.”
On Mozer’s current design plate: A yet-unnamed restaurant across from Lincoln Center in New York; a new Barney’s New York in New York; a home in Glencoe; an industrial building at the intersection of Halsted Street and North and Clybourn Avenues and the new H20 Plus headquarters near Greek Town on the Near West Side.
It’s not just the basic interior architecture that Mozer does. It’s the chairs, the lights, the wine cabinets, the door handles, the dishes and beer mugs, the coat racks-all the stuff that gives a place personality.
He’s even gotten up on a ladder at a couple of his projects, including Vivere, to paint wall murals.
“He is an American original,” says Paula Rice Jackson, editor of Interiors Magazine. “Nobody is doing what he’s doing, which is why everyone wants him. Every inch of a restaurant or nightclub that he does reflects his thinking and his hand. Last year, when we had our 14th annual interior design awards, with entries from all over the world, the jury gave him two awards, restaurant design and entertainment design. That kind of support for his wildly idiosyncratic designs is astonishing.”
Soon-very soon, he hopes-the chairs and lights and things that personify his restaurants will be for sale.
“We’re putting together a marketing plan now. We keep getting calls, `Where can we get that chair,’ `Where can we get these beer mugs,’ so the market is there. I call it design debris, and soon we’ll be selling it. I hope sometime next year.”
He is a man obsessed.
“It’s a collective obsessiveness,” he says, referring to the 10 members of his firm, Jordan Mozer & Associates. “We take an idea and relentlessly follow it through. Like at The Tempest (his first Houston restaurant), everything had to be windblown in some way, and all the imagery had to relate back to `The Tempest’ (the Shakespeare play). We totally immerse ourselves. If the wind is from that direction, then the arches have to lean this way and the bar . . . sorry, I’m going off on a tangent again.”
If it weren’t for the deep circles that seem permanently entrenched beneath his eyes, Mozer could be described as boyish looking. He’s got brown curly hair that not too long ago was pulled back in a ponytail and a disarming giggle that often pops out unexpectedly.
His non-linear thinking can have him talking about the pet pig, Piggy, he had running around his office for months-“it was round and pudgy, sort of like the chairs we did for the Cypress Club (restaurant) in San Francisco, I really liked that pig . . . it’s on a farm now”-and then, almost in the same breath, about how he likes the magical type of writing by Jorge Luis Borges, and how he believes magic applies to his own design work.
He’s working 80-hour weeks (“No, that’s probably too many. It’s probably only 76.”) and says he feels guilty if he quits before 10 p.m. When he and his staff are in the midst of a project-and when aren’t they?-he frequently orders in lunch and dinner. He says he’s racked up a “half-million bonus miles with United Airlines,” traveling to work sites in New York, Germany, Texas, Japan. His life, he says, is totally driven by work.
Overworked and overwhelmed
No matter how fast he runs, however, at least one of his clients says Mozer can’t keep up-and they’re paying for it.
Ken Sturm, owner of the yet-to-be-opened New York restaurant, says his newest venture “will be a spectacular place-wild, sloping, zooming shapes. I don’t think I could have gotten this design from anyone else, but at this point, I don’t know if it’s worth it. Jordan is spread too thin; he needs more people (on staff). We were supposed to open in August. It will take a long time to pay for all this (delay).”
And John Cunin, owner of the popular Cypress Club in San Francisco, says he “tortured” Mozer in order to get the job done on schedule. “I was not going to open late. I didn’t let him sleep; we were working until 4 a.m. some nights, and I’d pick him up at 6:30 (a.m.) to start again.
“Overall, Jordan is high energy, exciting. He’s an extraordinary guy. I would definitely use him again.” What drives Mozer at such a frantic pace?
“Beverlee (his mother and office manager) will tell you, when I was a kid, I would eat all my vegetables first. Then I would eat my meat. Then my salad. That’s the way I eat. I’m very disciplined, and right now, this is my life. I’ve built this good reputation, a very solid business. I’ve got to concentrate totally on this. I don’t want to blow it.”
Turning points
Mozer points to three turning points in his life.
The first was 1974, when his father, a doctor, died. Mozer was 15, with a younger brother and sister. “I accepted a lot more responsibility then. It was a case of saying `OK, I’ll take this on now’ and learning how to defer gratification.”
He toyed with becoming a painter or a psychiatrist, but nixed both ideas. Instead, he studied sculpture and fashion design at The School of the Art Institute, attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison, majoring in English and history. He received a degree in architecture from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The second turning point was in 1985, when he was mistakenly diagnosed as having lymphoma. He stopped taking on any jobs because, he says, he figured he wouldn’t have time to complete any projects.
“The diagnosis was wrong, but for 10 months I thought I had cancer. My Dad had died of leukemia, so it made a whole lot of sense to me that I would probably die. I came out of that incredibly happy that I wasn’t sick. I went about my work with even more enthusiasm than before. I mean, I was so happy to be alive.”
The third turning point was when the recession caught up with him. He had established his own business in 1986 and landed three jobs fairly quickly-Ed Debevic’s, Blue Crab and Scoozi, all Lettuce Entertain You restaurants.
“But then the recession hit us. We went from an office of 12 to 4 people. A lot of our big projects died. You have to understand how scared I was. I was working so hard, and everything just evaporated. And I was young, I didn’t know this kind of thing could happen. My Mom was working here, my sister was in college, and we had nothing to fall back on.”
The advantages of `M’
When the longtime owners of Chicago’s Italian Village decided to revamp its Florentine Room in 1990, they tapped Mozer.
“I’d say our new body of work started with Vivere (the renamed Florentine Room). That’s when all this seamless fantasy started,” Mozer says.
Seamless fantasy-restaurant interiors that are fantasy worlds, right down to door handles shaped like Mickey Mouse’s hand or chair legs wearing leg warmers and ballet slippers or beer mugs with feet that appear to be running off the table.
The motifs he employs are the “M” words-magic, motion and music. He intertwines the three-a magical island in the midst of an enchanted storm, as in The Tempest; a dance fantasy with leaping figures and musical notes transformed into light sconces in the soon-to-open New York restaurant.
“There was a kind of work I was doing before the recession, and then after the recession,” he says, “we reached a maturity in our work.”
“Surrealistic” is a word that’s sometimes used for Mozer’s work. The San Francisco Chronicle described the Cypress Club-full of exaggerated, voluptuous curves and bulges-as something like “Alice in Wonderland on acid.”
“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and I think, `This time I’ve gone too far, I’ll never work again.’ ” Mozer says. “But most of the time, I’m stubborn and relentless and very sure of what I’m doing.”
No time for fun
His studio is on the second floor of a 100-year-old firehouse, at the corner of Illinois and Franklin Streets. The ground level is dark, gloomy and deserted except for a couple of parked cars. Rickety steps go to Mozer’s second-floor studio.
“A lot of people walk in downstairs and then turn around and go back out to make sure they’re at the right address,” says Mozer’s receptionist.
The studio is cluttered-full of what he calls “design debris.” A red and blue velvet couch left over from a restaurant is in one area. Prototypes of lamps, mugs and glasses are scattered on tables and shelves. A bottle of Advil lives on Mozer’s desk, almost buried in drawings, papers and little clay or ceramic models of ideas.
It’s the work that’s important to Mozer, not the space he inhabits.
Nor, he says, is he interested in living more extravagantly with the money he’s making.
“The money, well, I sleep better at night. I don’t think I’ll forget how scared I was when everything seemed to go. I bought myself a new bicycle. I don’t hesitate anymore to eat out at my favorite chefs’ restaurants, like Charlie Trotter’s (on the North Side). But most of the money goes back into the business.”
He giggles and pulls out a bunch of credit cards and a few green notes, wrapped together with a rubber band. “See, this is my wallet. Impressive, huh?”
Mozer’s life right now is on the run, and it’s all work-related. There’s little time to play, go lie on a beach somewhere, even to get married.
“I think starting my own family will be an important part of my future, but I’m not ready for that yet. I’m focused totally on work, on building on what I’ve started.
“I know I’m obsessed. But I’m proud of what I’m doing.”
