Marcel is a new continental French restaurant in the iconic Breuer building at 945 Madison Avenue, designed, owned, and operated by Roman and Williams in partnership with Sotheby's. It is Robin and Stephen Alesch's second restaurant, following their celebrated downtown venture La Mercerie, and their most ambitious to date — a complete creative vision encompassing interior design, original furniture and lighting, tabletop, branding, and guest experience. Marcel is conceived as an intersection of culture, art, and hospitality — where cuisine and commerce meet, and the dining room itself becomes a living gallery. A rotating selection of Sotheby's masterworks hang on the walls alongside design objects displayed in vitrines, all available for acquisition, ensuring every visit to the room is a new one.

The Breuer Kinship
The restaurant is named for the building's architect, Marcel Breuer, with whom Roman and Williams discovered a deep kinship. Breuer was a serial maker across disciplines — designing furniture, lighting, hardware, and interiors alongside his buildings — and in that breadth of practice, the Alesches found a philosophy that mirrors their own. Deep archival research into Breuer's thinking and his original design for the Whitney only deepened that recognition. His Bauhaus formation, so often reduced to an image of austerity, was equally rooted in warmth, material experimentation, and the conviction that high craft belongs in every aspect of daily life. Informed by their findings, Roman and Williams chose to approach the building in dialogue rather than camouflage — standing up to the building with equal craft, rigor, and intellectual integrity, rather than disappearing into it.

The Entry
The approach to Marcel begins at street level on the south side of the building, where Roman and Williams created a new entry through what was the building's fire egress. Bronze planters and signage introduce the restaurant's material language, installed in compliance with the requirements of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. On the descent, bronze is joined by walnut in Breuer's own stair railing — a pairing that crystallized the restaurant's palette early in research, and that announces the materials that wait below.

The Architecture
The lower level of the Breuer building is bifurcated into two distinct conditions, and this demarcation shapes the architecture of the restaurant. The landmarked portion of the space — defined by Breuer's bush-hammered concrete columns, the soaring 30-foot volume connecting to the lobby above, and the building's original lighting scheme — is inhabited but architecturally preserved. Roman and Williams installed nothing that interferes with the original fabric; the luminous relationship between the lower level and the lobby remains precisely as Breuer intended. East of the column line, in the portion not part of the original Breuer fabric, Roman and Williams made their intervention, covering the walls in warm, rich walnut. The effect is spatially legible — Marcel reads like a section through the building, the column line serving as datum, with two countries sharing a border: on one side, Breuer's original fabric, monumental and untouched, defined by bushhammered concrete and the muscular geometry of the original structure; on the other, the warm walnut world of Roman and Williams. 140 guests inhabit both conditions simultaneously.

Interior Design
The interior of the eastern portion of the dining room is paneled in two types of walnut — Claro and Black Figured — book-matched and alive with the natural anomalies of the grain, embraced as marks of beauty rather than imperfection.

The open kitchen serves as the fire at the heart of the fortress — the source of warmth and movement that animates the room. Breuer's triangular Cyclops' eye window geometry is translated throughout the interior: in the faceted arms of the curved banquettes, the beveled millwork panels, and the trapezoidal walnut credenzas. Banquettes are tufted and upholstered in a dusty cocoa-hued Pierre Frey wine mohair, nodding to the refinement of the Upper East Side circa 1966, the year Breuer's Whitney building first opened. Hollywood booths are proportioned for intimacy — close enough for conversation, scaled for long evenings.

The bar is a mirrored jewel of spirits and light, its beveled detailing continuous with the triangular geometry of the room. Vintage Bauhaus stools anchor the bar, their tubular steel frames and leather upholstery in direct dialogue with the tufted mohair of the banquettes. Vintage Breuer lamps sourced from auction are placed atop the bar, with custom Roman and Williams Guild lighting throughout — Lentium sconces and lamps in cast bronze and amber cast glass and Hyssop Lamps— creating a layered atmosphere in which no single era dominates. The private dining room, seating 25, is upholstered in persimmon velvet and floored in custom-colored natural Kasthall carpets by the Swedish company of the same name.

During archival research, Roman and Williams discovered Breuer's original hardware designs and brought them to the New York architectural hardware firm E.R. Butler, who revealed they had the original production drawings, inherited from W.C. Vaughn & Company, in their own archive. Originally produced for a model house Breuer built in MoMA's sculpture garden in 1949, but never put into wider production, they have been made for the first time for Marcel, in Lucite and walnut.

The Sculpture Garden
The Whitney's original sculpture garden — long dormant — is reimagined as a convivial outdoor dining space seating 70. A forest of trees and sculptures create a gardened intervention that cossettes diners from the energy of Madison Avenue while immersing them in the architecture of the Breuer. A monolithic bar in Blue River marble, placed under Breuer’s bridge above anchors the space. The furniture consists of vintage bent-metal chairs with handmade cushions, evoking the outdoor life of the building's original moment, when the Whitney placed metal chairs in this very garden for visitors between galleries. The garden serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner.