TL;DR: Windom Kimsey spent 33 years designing buildings for other people before becoming his own client. This episode is about what an architect sees when he walks into a restaurant that an operator misses, what authentic hospitality design actually costs to get right, and why one person's commitment to a single city block can change an entire neighborhood.
Windom Kimsey is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and the former President and CEO of TSK Architects, where he spent 33 years designing everything from justice centers and schools to hotel towers in China. He retired from TSK in March 2024 to launch Blue Skye Development, his own development firm.
He's also the architect and owner of Azzurra Cucina Italiana, an Italian restaurant on Henderson, Nevada's historic Water Street district. He built Public Works Coffee Bar before that as a live/work hybrid, with his own office inside the concept. He's now developing Southend on Water, an 18,500 square foot mixed-use complex with office space, apartments, a wine bar, and his own residence. All of it in the same neighborhood. That's not a coincidence.
Windom guest lectures at AIA events nationally and internationally. He also funds an architecture thesis course at the University of Michigan, "Arid Logics: Climate Coexistence in Desert America," connecting students to the environmental realities of Las Vegas-area growth. He's been in the room designing spaces for decades. Now he's building the rooms for himself.
Windom describes seeing Cologne Cathedral as a teenager and feeling the world shift. That experience, that a space can change how you feel before anyone in it says a word, became the foundation of how he thinks about design. It's not a metaphor he uses loosely. It shows up in every project he takes on, and it's a useful lens for understanding why he approaches restaurant design the way he does.
For 33 years at TSK Architects, he designed for other people's visions. Clients had budgets, approval processes, risk aversion. Eventually the question became: what would I build if I were the client? In 2017, he answered with Public Works Coffee Bar. In 2023, Azzurra. Now, Southend on Water.
There's a specific moment Windom describes: the difference between the design brief he would write for a client versus the one he writes for himself. For a client, certain things never make it through. The Italian artist commissioned to paint portraits of his actual dogs, those portraits that guests ask about every service, would not survive a client's budget review. For himself, it made it through because it was right for the space.
That's the deeper point. Authenticity in a restaurant is not something you can spec out in a design document. It comes from the person who owns the place caring enough to make decisions that are genuinely personal. The dogs in the portraits are his dogs. Guests feel that. It becomes a conversation starter, and conversation starters are one of the most underrated drivers of return visits.
The rd+d magazine piece Windom was featured in put it directly: authenticity is "the single virtue that defines great restaurants over mediocre ones." His position on operationalizing it is that you can't design authenticity in. You can design space for it to live. But it has to come from somewhere real.
Henderson's Water Street district was overlooked for years. Windom saw something there that others didn't, or weren't willing to bet on. His investments in the block, Public Works, Azzurra, and now Southend on Water, aren't just separate business decisions. They're a long-term commitment to a specific place.
He's said he wants to "dedicate himself to Henderson." That's not marketing language. When you understand what he's actually building, you understand that the wine bar, the apartments, the office space, and his own home are all part of the same project. He's not just building venues. He's building a neighborhood.
Most operators are focused on the four walls. That's understandable. The economics of a single restaurant are hard enough. But Windom's view is that thinking at the neighborhood scale changes how you make decisions inside the building. Culture, staff investment, guest experience: all of it feels different when your personal residence is on the same block.
Windom has designed justice centers, schools, airports, courthouses. The common thread with a coffee bar: they all have to make people feel something when they walk in. A courthouse conveys authority. A restaurant conveys welcome. Different tools, same discipline.
Thirty-three years of public buildings trained him to think about how a space creates an experience before the human element kicks in. That shows up in how Azzurra is laid out, in how Public Works functions as workspace and gathering place, and in how he's approaching Southend on Water.
Windom is honest about what his architectural background did not prepare him for. Becoming a developer felt like a second career. Becoming a restaurant owner felt like a third. The day-to-day reality of running a restaurant is different from designing one, and he doesn't minimize that gap.
On design decisions that serve the guest without blowing the budget: thin margins are a design problem. Design problems have solutions. Being the architect and the owner lets him make decisions that are integrated rather than adversarial. He knows where the money is going. He knows what the operator needs. Those are not usually the same person, and the gap between them is where a lot of buildouts go wrong.
On maintaining personal touch as the operation scales, he's specific: the soul of a place lives in the decisions the founder makes before anyone else arrives. If those decisions are genuinely personal, they survive the founder's absence. If they're manufactured, they don't.
Jason's audience runs deep on AI and data, and Windom engages with those questions honestly. His take: a great room still matters in an era of Instagram and digital reviews. Maybe more than it used to. Because the room is what shows up in the photo.
On design decisions he wishes he could make with more data, he acknowledges there are choices he still makes on intuition. Guest flow, acoustic comfort, lighting at different times of day. These are things operators experience but rarely quantify. He's genuinely curious about where data starts to give architects and operators better answers.
On AI specifically: if he could use it to solve one problem in the design or operation of a hospitality venue, the answer is worth hearing in the episode itself. It's more specific than you'd expect.
Q: Do you need an architectural background to make intentional design decisions for your venue?
No. What Windom describes is a way of thinking, not a credential. The questions he asks about a space (how will a guest feel when they walk in? what does this room tell them before anyone speaks?) are questions any operator can learn to ask.
Q: Is commissioning custom art like the dog portraits realistic for a small restaurant?
It depends on the relationship, not the budget. The point isn't to spend money on art. The point is to make decisions that are genuinely yours. Custom doesn't have to mean expensive. It has to mean personal.
Q: How does being present in the building (like running your office inside Public Works) actually change operations?
You notice things. The guest who's been waiting too long. The table that's always empty at lunch. The staff interaction that's going sideways before it becomes a problem. Presence gives you data that a daily report never will.
Q: What's the one design principle Windom would give a restaurant operator who's renovating their space?
His advice in the episode: use your physical space more intentionally as a business strategy. Start with what you want the guest to feel in the first 30 seconds, then work backward from that to every decision in the room.
Q: What is Southend on Water and when does it open?
It's Windom's most ambitious project: an 18,500 square foot mixed-use development on Henderson's Water Street that includes office space, apartments, a wine bar, and his own personal residence. All on one site, in the neighborhood he's been building for years. Timeline details are in the episode.
Find this episode of the Hospitality Strategy Lab podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
If this episode made you think differently about your physical space, the Hospitality Strategy Lab is where we take those ideas and put them into practice. It's a community for operators who want to run better businesses, not just bigger ones. Join at lab.jlittrell.com.
If you want help thinking through how your venue design, systems, and guest experience are actually working together, that's what ASM Command is built for. Learn more at jlittrell.com.
Jason Littrell spent 10 years behind the bar in NYC, including Death & Co, and served as USBG NYC president. He now runs his hospitality consulting firm entirely on AI. He hosts the Hospitality Strategy Lab podcast and writes The Ops Wire newsletter.
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