Remembering a Beloved Collaborator and Friend

Rich Roat was co-founder and co-owner, along with Andy Cruz, of House Industries of Yorklyn, Delaware. Andy called us Wednesday with the unimaginable news that Rich had passed away that morning. Healthy, active, creative, energetic, and leaving a wife and two teenagers without a hint of any such tragedy on the horizon. These are the moments you don’t expect, when you hear news that makes everything in your body sink to the bottom of your stomach, and you find out the bottom of your stomach is lower than you thought it could be.

We’ve worked with Rich and House Industries on many projects over the past ten years or so — ceramic house numbers and clocks designed with their fonts. We’ve come to rely on their obsessive devotion to detail, always driving us to do better work. Rich was insanely bright, passionate, and humble. He and his team are those people you hope to know and work with, who inspire you on many levels, personally and professionally, and make you want to be better. The loss of Rich feels unmeasurable.

Rich’s approach to his job was to make it as close as he could to what he’d want to be doing if he didn’t have to have a job — and we can’t think of many who stuck to that philosophy better, requiring both wisdom and guts along with a little bit of just going for it because it’ll make you happy if it actually happens.

Over the years we learned how much in sync we were around the crossing over of design, creativity, and business. That if we don’t do things because we’re going to be inspired, learn new things, and enjoy the people we’re working with it’s not worth doing. That we learn and get better by trying things and learning, and building upon what we’ve done before; that it’s the process not the strategy. And, that it makes some worthwhile business sense will come from the faith that these ingredients make the magic, Rich taught us all this. After a while when working with Rich, we didn’t have to explain these approaches to our work, they just seemed obvious, and we looked forward to seeing what new creative endeavor — only when it “felt” right — might bring us together again. That we learned these things about each other on long bike rides, or while putting together workshops and events that invariably featured a live performance from the Mattson 2, made it that much more fun.

So while we are heartbroken as we say goodbye to Rich, a beloved collaborator who’s meant so much to Heath, to us and our family, we celebrate all that he helped us accomplish together and how we inspired each other over many years. Rich helped make us better people and made our work better, too.