Archie Bolden

Visited the new showroom in Atlanta that we designed. The intention was for clients to fully understand how the product would look in their home, so we ‘staged’ doorways and window walls all through the space around typical home settings - a kitchen, a dining room, and lounge etc. Showrooms are a tricky type of project because they have to be both fully designed AND under designed to ensure the product stays the center of attention.

We’ve started work on another adaptive reuse project - this is our fifth hotel to apartment conversion and we have the process well oiled. Our developer clients go into forgotten towns with low housing supply and buy old properties that we convert into apartment complexes. It isn’t sexy work, but it’s meaningful, and it’s really cool seeing these projects transform. This one is in the middle of South Carolina.

We’re working on the master plan of a large development site right now for .developments. It’s a combination of multiple individual lots, both publicly and privately owned, with the goal of creating a new kind of community mixed use development. Our team is global, so we are pulling from global precedents and exemplars and new ways of thinking about how a project like this can be programmed. It’s very early stages, we’ll keep you updated on the progress.

We drove out of the city recently for a site visit at one of the Adaptive Reuse projects we’re working on atm, checking out progress and seeing some scary stuff (which always happens on projects like this). You just never know what is going on behind those walls until you open them up. This is an old hotel being converted into an apartment complex and that services chase way down the middle of one building was a minefield! So - total replacement. This is why a contingency budget is so important! But this is our third such project with this developer so we’re all ready for the surprises as they come…

Everybody’s always going on about whites being hard to choose but have you tried choosing darks?! Those guys are extra difficult because the undertones become so prominent once you get a large expanse.

Being able to see past the shonky HVAC system and demoralizing red paint is totally an underrated skill as an interior designer.

We wrote about this site visit over on sub stack - “what we’re actually thinking about on a site visit (one that happens BEFORE the lease has been signed).



https://substack.com/

We’re in the middle of designing a co-working club so finish samples have started arriving into the studio. It’s three floors - each with its own vibe - sexy dark blues and walnuts on the top floor for the VIP members, mid tones with rusts on the middle, and light oaks and tans on the lower. We’ll keep adding to this samples pile and finding sneaky ways of adding little hits of metallic (of course, can’t resist).

Hand sketches in the studio, exploring facade ideas for a commercial architecture project we’re working on right now.

Archie is an Architecture & Interior Design studio with a global presence. View our polished portfolio & find out more at www.archiebolden.com

Archie is an Architecture & Interior Design studio with a global presence. View our polished portfolio & find out more at www.archiebolden.com
Let us blaze your trail.