They started a design business in their living room. Today, they make $50 million a year.

That was the vision of designers Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch, founders of the New York design firm Roman and Williams. About seven years ago, they opened the Roman and Williams Guild on Canal Street in New York City. It features their own designs as well as a collection of high-quality pieces from artisans around the world that, despite competition from what they call copycat products, have garnered big awards.

“Everyone was like, ‘This isn’t going to work,’” Standefer says. The duo stuck to their guns. “When we closed the books (in late 2023), we were like, ‘Wow!’ They had accumulated $50 million in annual revenue.”

It wasn’t the first time they’d defied expectations. Twenty-two years ago, Standefer and Alesch launched a small design firm in the living room of their NoHo loft. Roman and Williams, as they called it (after their maternal grandfathers’ first names), catered to “those Hollywood people,” like Ben Stiller, whom they’d met while designing the sets for “Zoolander,” and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Even then, their approach was iconoclastic: “We were like, ‘Why not do architecture, interior design and product design under one roof?’” Standefer explains. “The ‘consulting community’ was like, ‘You have to pick one… I don’t think so.’”

The couple, who married in 2005, quickly found success, including the opening in 2009 of The Standard, High Line, with its spectacular upstairs bar, which they designed. They were even hired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to design its new British galleries, which opened in 2020.

To the couple’s surprise, just over half of their $50 million came from merchandise and art sales and the restaurant, at a time when design retailers including RH (formerly Restoration Hardware) and West Elm are struggling.

For years, they say, a number of major brands have been trying to lure them into collaborating with them. After turning down offers, the couple has grown irritated when they see items that look familiar in stores.

“Stephen and I know that if we do it now, it will be copied,” Standefer says. “Whether it’s a hotel lobby or a table.”

As frustrating as it may be, Standefer says it’s almost unbearable to see this happen to some of the 90 or so often obscure artisans whose work makes up about 35 percent of the Guild’s merchandise sold: “These big brands are taking a picture[for a]mood board and then selling it for a fraction of the price.”

Kasper Würtz, a Danish ceramicist, creates deceptively simple plates and bowls in shimmering, speckled glazes in his studio in Horsens, Denmark. The products are sold in only a few stores, including The Guild. But in 2016, Scandinavian housewares group F&H Group launched a new line, named after a Danish television personality, that Würtz said resembled his work.

Würtz decided to fight back, which led to years of legal proceedings. During a seizure of material carried out by Würtz and his lawyer, Johan Løje, as part of the civil proceedings, they discovered emails from an F&H employee mentioning Würtz, asking Asian factories for samples “as close as possible” to the images shared by the employee.

(Charlotte Krath, president and CEO of F&H Group USA, responded: “That is not correct. In the email correspondence where Würtz is mentioned, it is specifically described that they do not want to achieve the same result and do not want to copy Würtz’s products in any way.”)

In January 2023, Würtz finally won his copyright claim over five products that F&H had stopped producing. He was awarded approximately $930,000.

Würtz developed two new enamel finishes that explode with color and texture, a gesture of creative defiance. They arrived in a “surprise box” of pieces that Standefer buys each year. “They come into the warehouse. Nobody has any idea what’s coming out of them,” recalls Standefer, who works on instinct. They were successful. “It’s my own crazy process of creating a retail brand.”

When I arrive at the Sea Ranch, the couple’s home in Montauk, New York, Alesch leads me through a long, fenced-in walkway, thickly covered with wisteria, wild roses and elderberries. Under my feet, oyster shells line the path. “It’s the transition to Narnia,” he says.

There is a strong connection between this “Narnia” and the Guild’s cash registers. By pointing out the curved lines of a tree, Standefer identifies it as the inspiration for their Catalpa sofa (starting at $20,750).

Over the years, Sea Ranch grew to 3 acres as the couple acquired neighboring land. But in the beginning, in 2006, they scraped together enough money to buy a modest home. Attached was a garage, which they converted into a studio. “The business was literally built out of that room,” Standefer says. A cabinet of curiosities, it’s filled with shells, bones, pods and other found objects.

Over a salad picked from the garden, the couple discussed some of their current design projects, including the reimagining of San Francisco’s historic Hearst Building. It’s set to reopen as the Hearst Hotel in 2026.

Working with a team that includes descendant Steve Hearst and operator Auberge Resorts Collection, Roman and Williams are incorporating objects from Hearst’s private collection, ranging from polychrome Gothic keystones from a Spanish monastery to medieval stone fireplace mantels from an abbey in England, into their interiors. In a phone call, Hearst described the design process with Roman and Williams as a “seamless adventure.”