On the Move: Industry Promotions and Hires

Celebrate friends and colleagues making moves across the architecture and design industry.

Perkins&Will

The New York studio of Perkins&Will has announced the appointment of Mike McElderry as architectural design director, filling the role currently held by Robert Goodwin, who will move into the role of design principal. McElderry has more than 15 years of experience as an architect and team leader and has helped navigate a range of complex projects collaborating with both public and private clients.

Additionally, Ashley Dias, Melissa Cooksey, and Julie Frazier have been promoted to principal in the firm’s Dallas studio.

Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams

American-made and sustainably-minded furniture brand Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams announced the appointment of Jennifer Gibbs as senior vice president of design. She will report to president and CEO Allison O’Connor at the company headquarters in Taylorsville, North Carolina. 

Spiezle Architectural Group

Anthony Catana has been promoted to associate principal at Spiezle Architectural Group, Inc., an employee-owned, award-winning, full-service architectural, interior design, landscape architecture, and planning firm based in Hamilton, NJ. Catana joined Spiezle in 1994 as an architectural designer and most recently served as a project architect, project manager, and director of building technology.

HKS

Industry veteran Meena Krenek has joined HKS as global practice director of venues interiors. She brings 24 years of experience as an interior design director and will be responsible for setting the overall strategy of the Venues Interiors practice areas including aviation, sports, and urban design.

Additionally, Tony LaPorte has been appointed director of brand experience. He joins HKS with 22 years of extensive experience helping major global corporations, prestigious health care and higher education institutions, and small start-ups leverage their brand for strategic advantage.

Merriman Anderson Architects

Dallas-based architecture and interior design firm Merriman Anderson Architects has  introduced two new team members to lead the firm’s interior design division. Tracy Rumsey has joined MAA as director of commercial interior design, and Erin Tallent has joined as director of hospitality interior design.

VS America 

Jill Ackers has joined VS America as education director, responsible for educational planning and professional development. She has over 25 years of experience as a school designer, educator, and leader in K-12 and higher ed.

Gensler

Bill Bouchey has joined Gensler as design director in the Los Angeles office. Over his 30-year career he has been a design leader for creative workplace environments including media, tech, entertainment, creative agency, and professional services and finance clients. He most recently served as principal, director of design interiors at HOK. 

Perkins Eastman

Emily Pierson-Brown has been named people culture manager for the global architecture and design firm Perkins Eastman. She will steer the diversity, equity & inclusion goals of the firm. Pierson-Brown has served as firm-wide leader of Perkins Eastman’s Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI) since 2018 and has been a member of its DE&I Operations Team since its inception.

Michael Hess has joined the firm as principal in the New York Studio. He brings 31 years of experience in healthcare program development with a portfolio of design and planning work spanning across the United States, Asia, and the Middle East. 

Eastlake Studio

Eastlake Studio, a Chicago-based architecture and design firm, will join geniant, a Dallas-based experience consulting company to transform the nature of design consulting. Geniant integrates expertise from architecture, interior design, user experience, service design, team and change management, and software development fields into the experience design profession. 

Cuningham

National design firm Cuningham has announced the appointment of Jacqueline Dompe as CEO. Dompe will be based remotely from California and will spend time among the firm’s offices and with clients across the United States. Dompe has more than 20 years of experience delivering value for a variety of companies, including those in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) industry.

Goettsch Partners

Goettsch Partners has made new leadership appointments. James Zheng has been announced CEO, and Paul De Santis will join James Goettsch as co-design directors. As the primary partners in the firm, the three have worked closely together for more than 17 years. Goettsch will also continue to serve as chairman while Zheng now assumes the full CEO title as well as president.

Main Street Hospitality

Joe Crimmins and Andres Gutierrez have been appointed to the leadership team at Main Street Hospitality. Crimmins will be vice president of operations, overseeing operations and sales teams for Main Street Hospitality’s portfolio of owned and operated hotels. Guttierez will be area director of revenue management, leading the execution and measurement of strategies and tactics designed to maximize revenue, market share and profitability.

Daun Curry Design Studio

Daun Curry Design Studio has added Paris Grant as studio director. Grant previously helmed her own eponymous design firm for nearly four years. She will be directly involved in strategic planning and hiring, managing clients and projects across verticals, and helping to guide design development.

American Society of Interior Designers

Gary Wheeler has announced his retirement as CEO of the American Society of Interior Designers. Wheeler took up the position in 2020, and led the organization through the aftermath and turbulence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having first joined ASID as a student out of Louisiana Tech, Wheeler quickly went on to be named an ASID Designer of Distinction before ultimately earning the title of Fellow.

Felder & Associates

Matthew Luehrmann has joined Savannah-based Felder & Associates as a project associate. Luehrmann studied at the University of Cincinnati where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Sculpture in 2017. He is currently studying architecture on an accelerated path through the Integrated Path to Architectural Licensure at Savannah College of Art and Design, and expects to graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Architecture in 2023 and a Master of Architecture degree in 2026.

Dufner Heighes Transforms a Historic House in Pelham, New York into a Modern Family Home

Flip back a page, please. Now, kick up your feet, relax—here, have a cocktail—and observe this intriguing wood-paneled room: the resolutely leafy view, that groovy triangular window, the serene quiet, the vintage-heavy furniture scheme. Bet you think this is the living room of some cozy ’70’s-mod cabin on a remote rural plot, right? Well, surprise! In fact, this is the second-floor sitting room of a painstakingly preserved century-old Edwardian-style manse within shouting distance (although please don’t; the baby’s sleeping) of the Bronx.

Dufner Heighes was the firm tasked with future-proofing the historic Pelham, New York, house for a growing family. The 7,100-square-foot dwelling has an intriguing back story. Previous owners include the island nation of Barbados, which used it as an embassy, and a Coca-Cola executive who frequently hosted President Eisenhower there back in the 1950s. Another head of state, George Washington, reportedly stayed on the property, too, in a structure that once stood on this abode’s exact footprint. That provenance piqued the interest of Erica Holborn, CEO of Sandow Design Group (Interior Design’s parent company) and a self-professed real-estate enthusiast. “I’m a house-with-a-story person,” she admits.

When Holborn and her husband, Andrew, first saw the property listing, they deemed the eight-bedroom too big for their needs. Fast forward a year later. Their Dufner Heighes–designed Sutton Place apartment was getting a bit too snug for their expanding family (especially with WFH in the mix), and their upstate getaway, a 1970’s A-frame designed by Frank Lloyd Wright protégés, was too far from the city for full-time residency. Plus, the Holborns got an offer on the latter that they couldn’t refuse. So when the price dropped on the Pelham place around the same time, they finally took a look—and were sold.

Among the structure’s many attributes was that it had been pristinely restored, from the oak millwork to the original hardware. “It was a perfect situation, because the previous owners had updated a few things, like the kitchen, but restored everything else—stripping layers of paint off moldings and all that stuff no one wants to deal with,” notes Daniel Heighes Wismer, firm copartner with Greg Dufner. In short, it was practically turnkey. Early site visits suggested the project would be primarily decorative and cosmetic: reupholstering some existing furnishings, buying new items to fill in a few gaps, replacing antique light fixtures with more modern designs, updating cabinetry, hanging artwork. Midway through planning the new kitchen, however, it became apparent the current footprint was underscaled for the size of the house and had an awkward, dinky island unsuited to cooking and dining. “During one of our meetings with the team from Bilotta, with whom we were designing the kitchen,” Wismer recalls, “someone questioned whether we could tear down a wall to annex the adjoining butler’s pantry—and that changed everything,” necessitating plumbing and electrical rerouting plus new structural steel. “My dream has always been to have a butler’s pantry,” Holborn sighs. “And then I finally buy a house with one—and promptly take it out!”

The monthslong renovation was well worth it. The new scheme is much brighter and airier, with a long Arabescato Corchia marble island that seats four, plus a window-wrapped breakfast nook. Dufner Heighes deployed two patterns of Artistic Tile terrazzo flooring, one incorporating marble chips, to create area rug–like accents that delineate spatial zones. Shaker-style cabinetry is simpatico with the period architecture yet modern enough to suit the décor. The same flooring and cabinetry also extend into an adjacent space, a former family room that now serves as a storage-packed mudroom.

The reinvention of a living space as service-oriented hub made sense, given the floorplan already offered a generous number of hangout areas, including the ground-floor salon and contiguous sunroom, a second-floor playroom for two-year-old Marlowe and baby Bodhi, a sitting room off the primary suite, and the family and game rooms that anchor the daylit basement level. “The challenge,” Dufner says, “was how to make each living space feel like it had a unique function and purpose.” Seating in particular was selected with specific activities and postures in mind. Thus the salon’s more upright Bob sectional, its firm, snakelike form perfect for perching with a glass of wine; the sunroom’s more lounge-y Bouroullec Brothers Ploum sofa, a holdover from the upstate house (albeit newly reupholstered); and the super deep, nap-conducive sofa in the family room, where TV viewing occurs.

Though the house has a traditional layout, with discrete rooms, they open graciously onto each other, and curating sight lines was particularly important. Many features were considered holistically so they would work together from room to room. On the first floor, for instance, “there are points where you can see the ceiling fixtures in the sunroom, living room, entry hall, and the dining room all at once,” Wismer explains. “So the lighting we specified all needed to work within their respective rooms and also as a cohesive group.” Furniture and other accents were chosen and placed similarly, he adds. “There was a balancing of where we could go a little wild and where something had to be toned down so it wouldn’t get too heavy or layered.”

Speaking of going a little wild, check out the dining room wallpaper. The pattern, a trippy graphic confection in riotous hues, tents the room, extending up from crisp wainscoting lacquered a mercurial green-gray color. The op art patterning is the perfect jazz riff on the abode’s 1914 bones. “The contrast between historic and modern is just so great,” says Wismer. A sentiment that summarizes the project top to bottom.

knoll: sofa

dunbar: side table

design for macha: ceiling fixture

through noguchi shop: floor lamp

garrett leather: armchair shearling

kvadrat: side chair fabric

blå station through scandinavian spaces: sofa

house of finn juhl: chairs

Gubi: coffee table

aronson’s: rug

bd barcelona through ddc: green side table.

Fredericia: daybed

lawson-fenning: vessels

bilotta: cabinetry

Artistic Tile: flooring

seungjin yang through the future perfect: pink stool

Blu Dot: yellow ottoman

through noguchi shop: pendant

Louis Poulsen: pendants

voutsa: wallpaper

e15 through stillfried wien: table

Carl Hansen & Son: chairs

iittala through fiskars group: glass birds

bd barcelona through ddc: credenza

aronson’s: rug

mitchell gold + bob williams: sofa

aronson’s: rug

Carl Hansen & Son: Lounge

Blu Dot: side table

through john derian: artwork

ligne roset: sofa

iacoli: coffee table

CB2: side table

Artistic Tile: flooring, counters

bilotta: cabinetry

Carl Hansen & Son: chairs, stools

e15 through stillfried wien: table

Louis Poulsen: pendants

casey johnson studio: custom table

Blu Dot: ottoman

through john derian: flowers

aj madison: appliances

lee jofa: wallpaper

through design within reach: rocking chair

dunbar: sofa

house of finn juhl: coffee table

floyd: shelving

stokke: crib

rejuvenation: ceiling fixture

nessen lighting: gold lamp

&tradition: coffee table, ottoman

Carl Hansen & Son: green lounge chair

mitchell gold + bob williams: sofa

aronson’s: rug

kvadrat: mama bear chair fabric

zak & fox: club chair fabric

design for macha: ceiling fixture

michael robbins: bench

lawson-fenning: bed

once milano: quilt

aronson’s: rug

flavor paper: wallpaper

Gubi: mirror

visual comfort through circa lighting: table lamps (sitting room, dining room, family room, bedroom); ceiling pendant (living room, dining room, foyer); floor lamps (living room, nursery); reading lamp (living room)

through furniture from scandinavia: items from fredericia, house of finn juhl, gubi, carl hansen & sØn, louis poulsen, and &tradition