Umé Studio is a multi-disciplinary design practice in Oakland and New York City, founded and led by architect Mei-Lan Tan. We focus on hospitality: hotels, spas, wineries, retreats, bath houses—and the materials, furniture, interiors, and landscapes inside and outside them.

Each of our projects is conceived as a cohesive whole, from the building down to the door handle, the lintel, and the stone underfoot. A single object can shape a room. Furniture and finishes are not selected from a catalogue, they are designed and made—the result of nearly a decade of fabrication relationships built at UMÉ, the design goods practice Mei-Lan founded in 2017.

Every project begins with a site read across many layers—physicality, history, culture, and future. The work that follows is research-led and fabrication-deep. What we build carries the values and specificity of its place.

Services

Architecture

Each project begins with exacting research, balancing precedent against market and culture until a distinctive philosophy emerges.

Planning

Umé Studio designs sites as total environments, where architecture, landscape, program, and movement are layered together into one deliberate composition.

Programming

Every project demands its own program; Umé Studio works to identify the precise mix of uses that gives a place its character and its staying power.

Hospitality

Umé Studio designs hospitality spaces as complete environments, where every layer from architecture to objects answers to a single design sensibility, producing places of total authorship that feel irreplaceable and impossible to leave.

Spa Design

Wellness, here, is not a typology but a sensory argument: temperature, light, water, and wind arranged so that beauty stops people in their tracks.

Interiors

Every object is placed with purpose, every surface considered not just for what it looks like but for what it does to the room and to the body moving through it.

Mei-Lan Tan

Founder of Umé Studio

Mei-Lan Tan is an architect, designer, and founder of UMÉ and Umé Studio.

Raised in California and of Indonesian and Chinese heritage, Tan brings a well-traveled, global perspective to her work, where a deep resonance with the sublime elements of nature informs her vision. Effortlessly refined, her style is relaxed and casual. An avid classic car collector, she channels the spirit of a life well-lived with quintessential California cool—open air, winding roads, and a sense of freedom.

A Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, she holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University, where she was recognized with the prestigious Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Award and the Baird Prize.

Her work has been published in Architectural Digest, Vogue, Dwell, Surface Magazine, Dezeen, Forbes, Bloomberg, Domus, and T Magazine, and exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Paris, Milan, and Tokyo.