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Adam Tihany is a practical man.

A native of Transylvania, he was raised in Israel and moved to Milan in the 1970s to study urban planning and architecture. Ensuing tough times called for career flexibility.

"There was no work, this wasn't the heyday of big architecture, so what the architect resorted to was doing everything hands-on, from furniture design to packaging – everything. There was this incredible creative thrust of talent that really gave birth to contemporary Italian design as we know it," he says.

CHERYL DIAZ MEYER/DMN

Mr. Tihany designed everything from the light fixtures to the door handles to the furniture fabrics.

Today Mr. Tihany has plenty of work. Inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame in 1991, he has designed more than 300 restaurants and hotels all over the world, from Kuala Lumpur to Rome and, now, Dallas. His design of the Joule, a boutique hotel on Main Street in downtown Dallas, is a small sample of his vast talent. He designed everything from the light fixtures to the door handles to the furniture fabrics.

The Joule Hotel on Main in downtown Dallas, from a building across the street

Michael Hawkins / Special to DMN

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"A consistent product comes from the sum of its details," he says.

Joule design is all about metaphor. The lobby represents good old Texas T, with a giant, revolving cog as its focal point intended to conjure the image of an antique oil derrick. Inside the restaurant Charlie Palmer, Mr. Tihany plays on the theme of wind. Oversize fans rotate overhead while his son Bram's photographs depict famous windy scenes from movies and folklore. (A joule, after all, is a measurement of expended energy.)

"The whole idea is a voyage to the center of the universe," Mr. Tihany explains of the Joule. "It's very site-specific. This hotel could only exist in Dallas and nowhere else, so when guests stay here they take away a piece of the hotel with them. It's unique. It talks about the town."

So it's only fair that Mr. Tihany do a little talking about our town, as well.

LARA SOLT/DMN

'This hotel could only exist in Dallas and nowhere else, so when guests stay here they take away a piece of the hotel with them.'

1. What's your impression of downtown Dallas architecture? "It's all very Mad Men architecture. It looks like it should be in a scene from the show. The '60s were really the heyday of corporate American architecture. You see it here in the government buildings and the rigorous architecture. I've always been fond of it; it's kind of a friendly fascism."

2. Talk about the metaphor of oil you used in the lobby. Where did that come from? "I wanted a contemporary derrick, you know, like in There Will Be Blood? I was really taken with the shapes of the derricks in that movie, so I put in this giant gear. It's very abstract, not in your face."

3. What are your favorite Dallas buildings? "I have to include Fort Worth, if you'll allow me. Louis Kahn's Kimbell is like Mecca for me. The Modern out there is also beautiful. The Richard Meier house on Preston Road I think is very good. And the Nasher, which is funny because Renzo Piano was a professor of mine."

4. What do you think of Dallasites? "When I actually started to meet Dallas people, I was actually smitten. I've found the people extremely generous, hospitable and open-minded. I've found this naive innocence here. It is lovely and sweet and open, and I felt simpatico. I felt immediately comfortable. I've felt people care about art and culture, and they are curious about the romance of the big city. Their sense of reverence is charming."

5. The 10th-floor pool at the Joule defies gravity and cantilevers over the street. Why did you design it that way? "I had to. The addition to the historic side of the building is this boring, flat building. Can you imagine [the facade] without the pool? *

* A 2008 Dallas AIA Juror Choice Award was given to Architexas, the architect and designer of the exterior of the historic façade restoration and the new design of the exterior addition to the west.

'A CITY ON THE PRECIPICE'

Artist Bram Tihany, 27, son of Adam Tihany, was commissioned by the Joule to photograph Dallas, its street life and its architecture, offering a portrait of the city as seen by an outsider. His black-and-white photographs can be seen throughout the hotel, as murals inside the elevators and as individual pieces hung on each floor. We asked him what impressions our city left on him when he finished his project.

"You can tell a lot about the city by its architecture and the beautiful architecture you have from the '60s and '70s ... of a time when Dallas' boom took place. As it is now, it's a city on the precipice of reinvention, a city like Dubai. Everything is going up overnight but everything is being built on nothing but hollow ground. Dallas has so much new architecture going up, not that I'm a fan of all of it, but that aside, there's this sense of the future of city. I see a birth ... the slow birthing pains of a great city."