The Central Park Boathouse has been a New York City staple since 1954, but it recently reopened under new management and with a refreshed look. “The restaurant, the service, the staff, the food—it all takes a step back to point at the people and the experiences people are having,” says Street Croci of Studio Friends & Family, the team behind the restaurant’s branding and design. Croci and his wife, Olivia Sergi, launched their firm in October 2020. The duo is based out of Cincinnati, Ohio, but has worked on projects from coast to coast (including chef Liz Johnson’s restaurant Horses in L.A. and her new West Village hotspot, Frog Club). Read on to learn about how Croci and Sergi worked to create “a simple space, a space that steps back, a space that doesn’t take away from the park, doesn’t take away from your experience.”
How did you come up with the name “Studio Friends & Family”?
Street: It comes from that friends and family night in the restaurant industry. We really love the hospitality space. We really love designing for experiences that customers/clients get to have that make them feel seen or understood by whoever we are working with.
What was your overall vision for the Boathouse?
Olivia: Our vision in all aspects—with the food, the brand, the interiors—was to give the Boathouse the new life that it deserves. We just wanted to bring life back into the space and freshen it up, not redo it or put any sort of new twist on the Boathouse, but just bring it back to life.
How did you approach the branding?
Street: The goal of the brand identity was to make it not look like this new restaurant, but to make it look like something that had always been there.
Olivia: The whole idea of the branding was to focus on the Boathouse as a place for birdwatchers, as a place to experience the nature within the park. Moving into the interiors, we adopted the same thing: What can we do here to focus on what’s outside and reflect it in here?
How did you execute that idea inside?
Olivia: We painted the ceiling blue, bringing in those colors from outside on nice days when the sky is blue. We brought in art from an artist named Raven Roxanne, who made incredible tulip paintings and daylilies, and some really beautiful paintings inspired by birds.
Does the Central Park Boathouse have a history with birdwatching?
Olivia: It does, which we didn’t know. The Audubon Society has met there for a very long time. There also has always been a register for birdwatching at the Boathouse, where you can log what you’ve seen there. When we took it over a year ago, the register was a three-ring binder with loose-leaf paper that was falling apart so we, as a part of our branding, created a very nice version of that.
Floral artwork from Charleston-based artist Raven Roxanne punctuates the bar area.
“Raven has a cool backstory with the Boathouse, too,” Croci shares. “She grew up as a kid with family that lived in the city. She would spend her summers in Central Park. It was a cool, full-circle moment with her artwork now being there.”
What’s the story behind commissioned paintings by Raven Roxanne?
Olivia: All of the paintings, at some point or another, she has created and sold on her own. We chose her work, already knowing that we love those paintings, working with her on the colors in the space to make it perfect.
Street: We FaceTimed her a few times, had a couple of meetings, and walked through the space to figure out what pieces to put in each place. The bar area really focuses on all the flowers and the fireplace room, which was originally where a lot of people would sit and birdwatch, has the nests and a bird painting. We tried to give each room a theme.
Can you explain the bar’s transformation?
Street: It was a really congested area that felt more like a workspace, less like a dining space. The bar top was a dark slate. We lightened it up and added a travertine-style bar top. We brought in some of the blue and put it underneath the bar at the backboard, which is really fun when it’s lit up at night.
Favorite part of the interiors?
Street: The bar has honestly become one of my favorite spaces to sit because you are tucked back in this little nook but you still have a view through the bar of the water. It just feels really nice and cozy.
Olivia: The shelf tops between the window bays in the main dining room. I love all of the little details we weaved in there. I just find it really fun to look at—vintage bird statues, model boats, modern lamps from Hay. They’re these pieces that all carry some detail.
How does it feel to have worked on a New York City landmark?
Olivia: It’s so wild to me, to be able to walk in and see what we did, and see people enjoying it and people in the space–it’s amazing.
Street: I second that. I think we both felt a lot of pressure going into it, being from out of the city. We wanted to make something that felt right and is good for tourists but also really good for people that live in the neighborhood.
