Yen Haduong and Front Studio
Yen Haduong from Front Studio talks about how her parents helped her live out her dream.
by Yen Haduong
Front Studio began in 2001 with an old classmate of mine from Carnegie Mellon, Ostap Rudakevych. We’re an architecture and design firm who believes that every moment must be approached with innovation and imagination. We prefer to work on conceptual and visionary projects while actually spending the majority of our time renovating lofts, offices and other spaces around New York.
My family came over from Saigon in April 1975, barely one year after I was born. As the child of immigrants and technically an immigrant myself, it’s been hard for my parents to understand about the visionary aspects of Front Studio. We came over with barely a suitcase, my parents spent much of their initial years in the States just trying to make ends meet. Their goals lay in establishing secure and reliable careers to support their four children. When we first began Front Studio they were constantly worried about how we were supporting ourselves and how we were finding work but they never asked about what our philosophies were and in what creative direction we wanted to take the firm.
It used to frustrate me as a child that my parents didn’t know anything about being American, that they maintained a strict Vietnamese household. We only spoke Vietnamese at home, we weren’t allowed out with boys, we were constantly doing homework - in short we were raised according to all the precepts that my parents brought over with them from Vietnam. Even down to career choices. In high school I wanted to be a writer. I love reading and have read voraciously since I was a child so literature was all I wanted to pursue. Unfortunately I am the eldest sibling. For my parents, still struggling to see all four children through college, writing was not a real profession. And so architecture was our compromise between art and science and something my parents felt could be a serious career.
Lucky for me, I love architecture. I love everything about the process of creation and the art of making something tangible. After graduation my parents reluctantly let me go spend a year in Paris trying to find a job and learning how to speak French. We were so broke, my parents had no money to help me out with and I had no real savings. I relied on my relatives already living in Paris. They supported me throughout the entire year, giving me not only a place to live but instant friends. With no success on the job front but fluent in French, I came back to New York City. Several years later, a contractor contacted me to work on a $1.8 million dollar loft renovation in downtown New York City. The French decorator and French client needed a local architect fluent in not only French, but also New York City Building Codes. I immediately called Ostap and we launched Front Studio with nothing more than a computer and a desk.
Initially it bothered me that my parents didn’t have a network of connections that longtime Americans have to help build our business. But in retrospect I realize that without my family, Front Studio may not have come to be. My parents supported me in my decision to move to Paris with no leads and no prospects and my relatives in Paris supported me the entire time I was there. Currently close to half of Front Studio’s clientele is French speaking and we work closely with the French Embassy, maintaining many of their apartments throughout the city.
I am always thankful when I think of my parents’ continual emphasis on education and the greater picture. They believed in and pushed us to achieve greater success in learning and intellectual pursuits at the sacrifice of more materialistic interests. They didn’t have a problem with spending their money on books but would rarely allow us new clothes when old hand me downs still worked. It is my parents who encouraged me to spend that time in France, absorbing everything about the culture and architecture. And it is now that history that contributes to the on-going progress of Front Studio.