Welcome Bienvenue is a Designer/Fabricator creating incredible restaurant interiors, primarily in New York City, and he rarely uses design plans of any kind.
He’s creative, driven, quick and independent. With his big, black cowboy hat, a hilariously thick French-Canadian accent, a Bigger-Than-Yours truck, and an FU swagger, Welcome gets noticed wherever he goes. And he goes EVERYWHERE. New York, Connecticut, Montreal, Atlanta, South Carolina. He has multiple clients with multiple restaurants, and they all love him. He is frequently given carte blanche to do what ever he wants, and the results are mind blowing!
Welcome comes from Granby, Quebec, Canada a small city east of Montreal with a population of about 75,000. Granby has a reputation as a very creative environment. (Many of the creative staff of ‘Le Cirque Du Soleil’ are from Granby.)
A reason for that may be the fact that the city opened an experimental high school, providing them with enormously creative outlets. The students had access to a full theater, a fully equipped wood shop, a metal, shop, a campus radio station, an eight-track recording studio and a TV production studio. Subsequently, many of Welcome’s schoolmates now work as designers in television, theatre and film.
While there he developed an interest in music production.. He taught himself how to edit audiotape, and started to hang out at the local radio station. There he started recording radio commercials for the station and doing live sound for bands. Some time later he partnered with a mentor from the station and opened a small juice club for teenagers.
In the early 1980’s, he spent some time in Miami, where his older sister lived. There he started working in the building trades as a painter and tile man.
After a while, he moved north to Connecticut to help his other sister tile her kitchen floor. When the local tile supply house discovered how quickly he completed his sister’s kitchen, they hired him and he started doing tile work regularly.
On the weekends, he was doing live sound for a local company. That is how he met his wife, who was a singer. They married and he later started working at a local recording studio as a way of furthering his wife’s career. At the studio, he met keyboardist, Joe Carrano and together they started a production company. For the next ten years, he and Joe worked with major artists through DJ/remixers Junior Vasquez, Danny Tenaglia and Victor Calderone. He and Joe also produced tracks for Donna Summer, Vicky Sue Robinson, Kristine W and RuPaul.
Welcome continued to work in the building trades and performed home and studio renovations for many of the same artists and DJs he was working with as a producer! Later, he was contracted to build, from the ground up, a multi-room recording studio in Westport Connecticut.
When music work dried up with the collapse of the music industry, Welcome had time to follow his interest in the professional rodeo circuit. Not as a rider, but as a fan. To help cover his travel costs, he developed the brand ‘COWGIRLGEAR’ and created a logo. He purchased a silkscreen machine and built a custom booth. For three years, he sold ‘COWGIRLGEAR’ branded women’s apparel and never spent another penny out-of-pocket for a rodeo.
Professionally, Welcome’s business evolved into the design and renovation of commercial spaces and through this he came to realize that he had a touch for doing restaurant interiors. The budgets were better, and he felt more creative satisfaction from formulating a restaurant’s design and bringing it to completion. His reputation grew to where restaurant interiors became his primary focus. He is now regularly booked several months in advance on restaurant projects.
