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An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

Travel. We’re very lucky that we get to travel quite a bit for work and a bit more for fun. Our international travels have taken us across Europe into parts of China, Japan, Australia and more. When we finally got to travel back to London to visit family and friends after lockdown we realized how much the energy of a new place and inspiration found in a new city means to us. It’s good for our creative process and gives us something to talk about besides the business. j/k. Kind of.

As a part of our series about lessons from Thriving Power Couples, I had the pleasure of interviewing Melissa and Seth Hanley of Blitz.

Melissa Hanley, principal and architect, co-founded award-winning commercial architecture firm, Blitz, in 2009 at the age of 26. Since then, the firm has grown to three studios (San Francisco, Los Angeles and Denver) and has undertaken commercial, retail, and hospitality projects across the world. Well-known clients include Google, Instacart, Microsoft, Levi’s, Skype, Webcor Builders, and Parachute Home. Her firm has been responsible for the design and implementation of more than 300 projects totaling over 5.5 million square feet. Melissa’s work includes many international commissions, as her firm has transformed whole buildings, complex technology campuses, and multiple offices and restaurants throughout the US, Europe, Australia, and Asia.

As an expert in commercial interior design with specific emphasis on workplace strategy, she regularly lectures at universities and contributes to technical and lifestyle publications such as Architect, Interior Design Magazine, Fast Company, Inc., SF Business Journal, Contract, Vanity Fair, GQ, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and the WSJ. Additionally she has been privileged to serve on several AIA and IIDA awards juries.

Melissa has authored Blitz’s ‘Hacker’s Guide to the Post-Covid Workplace’ and has spoken on the subject of re-entry strategy on panels for IIDA National, San Francisco Business Time Leadership Trust, Steelcase, and several real estate brokerage and venture capital firms. She lives in Sebastopol with her husband (and business partner), Seth, and two Frenchies, Beauregard and Bardot.

Seth Hanley, LEED AP Co-Founder, Principal, and Architect.

Seth, a co-founder and partner of Blitz, performs many roles in the studio and across the business, but his primary focus is assisting the Blitz team with technical feasibility and code compliance. Great design can be transformative, and getting it there requires a dedication to service and technical excellence. Seth’s day is a success when things run smoothly and clients are happy.

Seth grew up in London where he developed an early and strong interest in the built environment. That interest led him to Leeds Metropolitan University for a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture, and Oxford Brooks University for postgraduate diplomas in both Architecture and Urban Design. Seth re-settled in California in 2001. He’s been licensed to practice Architecture in California for nearly a decade and feels privileged to work everyday in an industry that he loves.

Seth has worked with leading technology companies like Skype, Comcast, Zendesk, SquareTrade, and Bandai to name a few. His work has been featured in over 100 publications around the world, including Interior Design Magazine, Vanity Fair, GQ Japan, and many international design blogs such as Contemporist, Designboom, and ArchDaily.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you two to your respective career paths?

MH: I’m so envious of the people who say they knew they wanted to be an architect from the time they were four years old. For me, it wasn’t until my 20th birthday, but my interest in experimentation and creative design developed when I was a child. My father is a contractor and fine woodworker, and my earliest memories are of us drawing and painting together. My parents saw my interest in art and put me in after school art lessons from the age of six. Growing up in such a creative environment gave me the sense of exploration and freedom to test ideas without restraint — often to the detriment of the walls and furniture. My design epiphany came during my second year of college. At the time, I had convinced myself that I should sideline creative pursuits as hobbies only and should pursue law as my profession. I joined a mid-sized firm straight out of school doing mostly K-12 education projects. In 2006, I met my future business partner and now-husband, Seth, when he came to work at the same firm. He was in a separate studio and it took two years before we would finally get to work together on a project competition. It was on that project that we identified in each other an ally in design and a common attitude towards the world and the work.

SH: Hanley: My interest in architecture began as a child growing up in London. I was always designing and building things with LEGO as a kid, and I had my first drawing board when I was 12. After working in retail design, multi-family housing and health care I met Melissa at a mutual firm. Together we founded Blitz.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you two got married?

In mid-2009 at the height of the economic downturn, we were both laid off from the firm we were working at — along with ¾ of the staff. The next day, while nursing a serious tequila hangover, Blitz was born. There was a 40% unemployment rate in the A+E industry in San Francisco at the time and we knew that, if we wanted to stay in the profession, we were going to have to make our own way.

Within four months, through one of Seth’s connections back in the UK, we landed Skype’s North American headquarters in Palo Alto. The project quickly grew from a 10,000-square-foot space plan to a 90,000-square-foot building. We delivered the project from our dining room. It was an exhilarating and terrifying experience figuring out how to work together, build a business, and deliver what was one of the largest projects going in the Bay Area at the time. We remember pulling an all nighter until the taxi picked us up to go to the airport. We slept on the red-eye flight to London and then presented the design to the executive team that day. We completely forgot that they don’t have 11×17, they have A3 and there was quite the fluster of printing and presenting. It all worked out and that project was the springboard for the firm in many ways. While we didn’t set out to create a workplace interiors firm, we found the speed and sense of creative experimentation of the project typology aligned with the way we liked to work.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

In our practice, we are looking to move the needle on progress, creativity, culture, and invention. It’s important to address meaning and value in our work while designing in a climate that prizes innovation and, foremost, speed. Our work must be more than just placing employees in workspaces to be truly valuable. This forces us to engage our clients in a conversation about why a project will be meaningful.

This is usually a new type of conversation for our clients and a new metric to judge their own work, which can be a rewarding challenge. Continuing to put the topic of “why this will be meaningful” at the center of our work is a constant challenge given the schedule and economic pressures.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We’ve been working on a new algorithm about time as a planning variable for commercial real estate. As the workforce has become more fluid and less location dependent taking into account this fluidity over time is critical to right-sizing the space requirement which, ultimately, will save our clients a lot of money in capital expenditures.

What advice would you give to other CEOs or founders to help their employees to thrive?

Taking a position of humility was critical to tackling the steep learning curve of starting a business very young (26 and 33 respectively). I’ve seen a lot of my peers act like they know more than they do and that just backfires. I’ve found more mentorship and support in this profession by honestly acknowledging what I don’t know and being open to standing on the shoulders of giants. This vulnerability signals to our staff that no one knows everything and we’re always learning. We are a team of curious people and that’s what makes our work as good as it is. We are always asking for the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’. If you already have all the answers then there is no reason to be curious which is antithetical to our values.

How do you define “Leadership”?

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

John Hunter, who is a prinicpal at our firm….We both worked with him at our prior firm and as soon as we could afford to hire him we did. He likes to remind us that he has been doing this for longer than we have been alive. A total sponge for details, materials and systems. He has been critical to the technical backbone of the firm. He has been critical to the cultural backbone as well as he has never shot down a crazy idea and has even developed a spec section for ‘the weird shit’ we put in projects. A 22’ dinosaur being the most banal.

What are the “5 Things You Need To Thrive As A Couple”? Please share a story or example for each.

  1. Our dogs. They are just little lights of delight and mischief and it’s hard to take anything too seriously when you have a frenchie snorting in the background.
  2. App-based support for the business of life. Instacart, grubhub, bonvoy, etc all make those annoying time-suck tasks much easier. Anything that gives us time back is huge. Since we both travel quite a bit for work (often in opposite directions — yes we’ve had airport dates while coming and going) any time we can spend together is important.
  3. Our housekeeper. We know this is super boujee but she has been with us for 12 years and we both swear that we would choose her over each other if pushed. She brings a level of care and attention to detail that any luxury business would kill for. Not spending time or emotional energy on figuring out who is going to clean the bathroom has been a game changer. After she’s been we honestly feel like someone has taken care of us — which is something of an anomaly given our roles at work and our roles within our extended families.
  4. An excellent couch. Don’t laugh. If you’ve ever spent 5 minutes in a furniture showroom observing any couple you know couch shopping is a divorce waiting to happen. We are lucky that we have very similar tastes. We just finished a 3 year renovation which had us using temporary and uncomfortable furniture and treated ourselves to an epic sectional. Being able to sprawl out with the dogs at the end of a crazy week is pretty perfect.
  5. Travel. We’re very lucky that we get to travel quite a bit for work and a bit more for fun. Our international travels have taken us across Europe into parts of China, Japan, Australia and more. When we finally got to travel back to London to visit family and friends after lockdown we realized how much the energy of a new place and inspiration found in a new city means to us. It’s good for our creative process and gives us something to talk about besides the business. j/k. Kind of.

You are people of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

Carbon neutrality for all commercial real estate. Climate change is the number one threat to public health in the 21st century, anything you think of as a public health problem is probably made worse by climate change. It turns out that we in the building industry are responsible for at least 39% of human energy related climate emissions. 28% of that is running every building in existence, that’s our operational energy use. The other 11% is the structure and enclosure materials and the emissions from job site emissions from building. The only thing that humans use more of than concrete is water, not oil, not milk, not coffee. Water is the only thing we use more of than concrete. If cement production, just the cement part of concrete, was a country, it would be number three after the US and China in terms of global climate changing emissions. So if folks in the CRE industry could do one thing it would be to make their projects as close to carbon neutral as possible.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

MH: My mom always used to say, ‘this too shall pass’. It’s good to keep things in perspective and realize that that crisis which seems so pressing at the moment is really just a ripple in the ocean.

SH: It’s totally cheesy but Tony Robbins was interviewed on the BBC and said that ‘if you blame someone or something for the bad you also have to blame them for the good’. It reminds me that there are always two sides to a situation and we can choose to see the silver lining or dwell on the bad.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂

Cocktails with the Obamas please and thank you.

How can our readers follow your work online?

Our website studioblitz.com or our instagram @makeitblitz

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.


Lessons from a Thriving Power Couple, With Melissa and Seth Hanley of Blitz was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.