ArchiveFM

Duration
41m
Broadcast on
23 Oct 2026
Audio Format
other

Before Campfire, Providence, and Marrow Fine, there were two creatives building furniture by hand.

Barbara Rouke & Jason St John, co-founders of Bells + Whistles, join Brick & Brand to share how they grew from hand-built furniture into an award-winning design firm behind some of the country's most talked-about restaurants. We get into turning an old mechanics shop into a destination, working with top chefs (and when to push back), where operators should never cut corners, and the lesson they'd tell their younger selves.

The best spaces aren't just designed. They're built by people who care how you feel when you walk through the door.

Bells + Whistles | Interior Design

If you're listening to this, there's a good chance you're a small business owner. And like every small business owner, you started with a dream, to do what you love and watch it grow. What you probably didn't dream about, keeping up with cyber threats. That's where MasterCard can help. With access to tools that help identify cyber threats to better protect your business. Building your dream business, price-less. For cybersecurity in a changing world, there's MasterCard.
Learn more at MasterCard.com/smallbusiness. Welcome back to Brick and Grand, a podcast at the intersection of retail and entrepreneurship. We're your co-host, Delaney and Bradley Roach. Today's guests have worked with some of the most talked about restaurants in the country. From Camp Fire in Carlsbad to the Michelin starred Providence in Los Angeles, they've really helped bring to life so many incredible restaurant and retail concepts. What started as two creatives, literally building furniture by hand, has turned into this amazing brand, Bells and Whistles. And they work with some of the biggest names in hospitality now. So today we're getting into the founder's perspective on some of these brands, the stories behind the most memorable projects they've worked on together. And just what they've learned along the way. So we're so excited to welcome the founders of Bells and Whistles to the show today. Barbara and Jason, thank you for being here. Thank you for having us. So excited to get into everything you guys have built. So Barbara or Jason, whoever wants to start here, can you just take us back in time a little bit to the beginning of your journey when you founded and launched Bells and Whistles? And how did you go from building furniture and really just bootlegging it, like so many startups to working with the brands you work with today? Yeah, I mean, it's been a very interesting journey. Barbara and I are connected with our minds, our creative minds are really kind of connected to the hips when it comes to design. But we kind of dreamt a long time ago of concepts of building stuff together, of like creating things and just a free flow of kind of information, concepting, everything else. But we were, I was kind of taking classes at Mesa College with our mentor, Dave Fobs on contemporary wood furniture design. And we kind of learned everything and how to build everything. Barbara and I met and I kind of can encourage her to take these same classes. And we just learned how to actually create everything from, you know, wood furniture design to metal fabrication, everything else. So we learned the basics of how to actually build things and sculpt things. So to go from that to actual interior design was like a big jump. We had a studio for 10 years with lots of shop equipment and capabilities of building kind of anything. Our first restaurant was Starlight, I think completely back in 2007. So next year will be this 20th year. And we were able to and still able to like kind of envision a space before it's built. So we can kind of see the entire space in our minds, talk about it, see where everything's going to go. And then we go back to the drawing board and actually kind of sketch everything out

Transcription truncated.