The interiors of a Lower East Side apartment washed in saturated pastels and natural light from windows overlooking Manhattan warranted an Architectural Digest feature in January 2020. Those interiors also highlight the design talents of Armann Ortega ’07 — talents first discovered and explored at St. Pius X High School.

Through his New York City interior design company, AO Atelier, Ortega designs residential interiors for projects ranging from New York City apartments to beach houses in the Hamptons. New home construction in Long Island, light commercial projects and occasional work in Los Angeles round out his project calendar.

You might trace Ortega’s path to interior design back to a knee injury suffered during basketball his sophomore year at St. Pius X. His family lived life around sports. He played football his freshman year, and he and his two sisters all played basketball. “I very much projected myself as staying in that bubble of sports,” Ortega says in 2020 from his West Chelsea apartment. “But because of that injury, I shifted gears. When I started taking AP classes my junior year and started focusing on academics, it led me down the path of arts.”

At that time Jennifer Hillsey was his AP English teacher. “Ms. Hillsey was instrumental in my creative upbringing,” he says. Once exposed to creative pursuits, Ortega jumped in fully. He took painting and photography with Dr. Trinidad Lopez, auditioned for Esperanza Plath’s production of The Crucible, earning the lead role of John Proctor.

“It was a big flip for me, from sports to the arts scene at Pius,” he says. “I encourage students to really take a chance and explore. At St. Pius there is a diverse curriculum that allows you to try different things and lots of programs from athletics to clubs and activities. That exploration could cause you to change your outlook and future goals and pursuits. It was a pivotal moment in my life.”

By the end of his  junior year, Ortega knew he wanted to go to New York City. A project assignment in Ms. Hillsey’s AP English class led Ortega to create a film, which became his portfolio submission when he applied to the highly competitive Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Inspired by his SPX theater experience and interest in production design, Ortega pursued a degree in film and television production at NYU with minors in art history and political science. “Production design really interested me because it was part of the storytelling, partnering with directors and camera operators and building out a world through architecture, color and texture,” he says.

After graduating from NYU in 2011, Ortega worked in production design the film industry for five years, including on the Dark Knight Rises and various independent projects. When the 12-hour days and 6-months stints away from home got tiresome, he made the transition to interior design. “Art is a beast, it’s time consuming and demanding,” Ortega says. “Also, in film you’re always trying to make something look real; make something that’s not marble, look like marble. I was dying to work with real marble. I made the decision to pivot to interiors.”

Ortega started his business in 2014 and says like any start up, it was a roller coaster, but bringing his approach to film to his interior design work gave him a solid place to start and has carried him forward. “Who is your character?” he asks himself. “Then I build that world around them through artwork and furniture. That world should reflect who they are or who they want to be. It’s a full 360-degree, aesthetic visualization of who they are. We want our clients’ dreams to come true.” 

To achieve that, he takes his prospective clients through a questionnaire that deals with design preferences along with abstract ideas, hobbies and interests. “I want an understanding of who they are as a person,” he says. “I want to create a very clear aesthetic mood board of who they are and then go from there.”

Partnering closely with clients on projects that last from six months to more than a year, Ortega says it’s important to determine before taking on a client that their aesthetic and communication preferences are a good fit for both client and designer. 

“Also, people trust you to work with their money,” he says. “The reality is clients have several hundreds of thousands of dollars to work with; you have to make right decisions spatially and aesthetically for them.”

Ortega says often his design work is 85 percent problem solving, especially in New York City apartments where he deals with elevators, building restrictions, and often the need to build furniture inside the spaces it will be placed. 

That concrete jungle is a pendulum swing away from the Albuquerque home where his parents still live near Academy and Tramway. “But the space in Albuquerque, the mountains and the view, it’s naturally a stunning place to grow up,” he says. “And relationships formed at Pius can continue into your future. My very best friend from St. Pius, she’s now in New York, so I still spend time with old classmates. I expected to not have that happen, but relationships start there and don’t end.”

Get a deeper look into Ortega’s designs by visiting his website and viewing the piece in Architectural Digest.