Designing Change

Designing Change

Andy Dohmen has helped Design Styles Architecture transition into commercial work although it has found a niche in affordable housing.

ARCHITECTURE by Dave Szymanski | Tampa Bay Editor

Andy Dohmen built homes as a stone mason. At some point, after lifting blocks of concrete as the sun baked his back, he decided to go to school and learn to design the homes he built.

Dohmen graduated from architecture school at Florida A&M University, and went to work as the in-house architect for Arthur Rutenberg Homes.

In 1998, he and fellow architect Peter Fertig became business partners and started Design Styles Architects, a private architecture firm in Clearwater.

They began working out of their homes, Dohmen in Clearwater Beach and Fertig in Tampa. But as business grew, they opened a single studio in Clearwater in 2002. They added staff and expanded that space in 2003.

In building this business, Dohmen, 45, likes to call on his experiences on both the building side and designing side of the industry. He believes it gives him an inside understanding of how to be a realistic, customer-focused architect. That's why he takes his architects out of the office, into the field.

"We talk about what would work for a structure, from a design standpoint, and what wouldn't work," Dohmen says.

Design Styles specialized in home design and worked with many national and local homebuilders like Lennar and Jim Walter Homes in about 15 states.

But with the downturn in the housing market, architecture, construction and landscaping firms have laid off staff. Design Styles has not. Instead, it has attracted a portfolio of commercial work, including office buildings and a hotel, and maintained its staff level.

"It's been because of the diversity of our work" that layoffs have been avoided, Dohmen says.

Affordable homes

Although Design Styles made a transition to commercial work, it has not abandoned residential.

It is now moving into the niche of designing more affordable housing.

"The biggest thing now is value engineering new product," Dohmen says. "The housing market went south. The builders want to bring the numbers down. Designing what they had was too expensive to build."

The answer: Creating new designs and simplifying existing ones. Fewer corners in a house means a more simple roof truss structure. They are removing glass above doors and lowering 10-foot ceilings. All of this means a lower price.

"It is keeping us busy," Dohmen says. "They (homebuilders) are in a panic. They're got to sell something, something at different price points."

That points to simplicity.

"The more rooflines, the more expensive the roof," he adds. "It is like drawing a line down the middle of the roof. We're trying to bring the product toward that level of simplicity. There's been a push with all the builders out there."

But architecture is only part of the home cost. There are also land costs.

"Land is too expensive," Dohmen says. "The lots they are looking at are too expensive. Everyone is realizing, all they were offering in 2005 and 2006 won't work."

So builders are discounting bigger houses to get them off of the books.

"There are at a point where you have to cut your losses," Dohmen says. "We had clients going through inventory being very aggressive. They are weeding out their inventory."

And that points directly at his industry.

"Architects feel it first," he says. "Bigger builders, their business is to sell and build homes. It's like a widget on the shelf. If they continue to put that on the market, they will shoot themselves."

Going commercial

Design Styles gradually transitioned into more commercial work, such as office buildings and office build-outs. It is designing a retro-look hotel in St. Pete Beach.

"This is less impacted by the market conditions," Dohmen says. "Typically residential and commercial have inverse cycles. Knowing the history of it, we began diversifying the company."

Transitioning meant diversifying tasks among the staff. There were still jobs for people remodeling and building custom homes, but commercial was growing.

The Gulf Boulevard hotel project on St. Pete Beach will have 37 two-bedroom suites in an Old Mediterranean style.

"We are making it like a 50- to 100-year-old building," Dolmen says. "It's the first hotel in more than 20 years."

It has finished an office building, now in construction, that will be the headquarters for Clearwater-based Postcard Mania. It is doing another for Powercom in Tampa.

The $5 million Postcard Mania project consists of a 22,800-square-foot office for 200 employees above a two-story parking garage. The exterior of the building is an urban industrial design intended to emulate a New York style-warehouse circa 1920. The interior has been designed as an open, colorful and high-energy avant-garde world with cost efficient materials such as exposed block walls, exposed mechanical systems and stained concrete floors.

Realistic designs

Affordable housing designs are a collaborative effort between Design Styles and the builders. Its clients were building homes in the 2,000- to 4,000-square-foot range. Now there are in the 1,300- to 2,000-square-foot arena.

"On the housing, we're so much into the details," Dohmen says. "I grew up in construction, so I'm focused on buildability. We're very much in tune with how the thing goes together."

Part of that means that everything Design Styles designs, it does so with furniture in mind, so the rooms are functional and people can move.

"Working with builders for so many years, starting with Arthur Rutenberg, makes sure it is embedded into us," Dohmen says. "The builder starts with a blank paper. We start off with a blank paper. We have to have an understanding of how a building goes together. We're constantly working it out."

Design Styles is in the process of getting LEED-certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) to design energy-efficient, LEED-certified buildings. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has pushed for this in state contracts.

For Design Styles, that means greater emphasis on designing more energy-efficient windows and doors.

"It's going to be another thing to help us stand out against the competition," Dohmen says.

When Dohmen started, architects were drafting jobs by hand. That transitioned to computer-aided design. Now his staff is doing three-dimensional models.

The renderings use software. Some objects in the design have click-on information or a sort of "intelligence" to them. The firm shows the client the design on monitors and on a six-foot projection screen.

This is one of Design Styles' biggest lessons learned: Keeping current with architecture technologies.

"We are learning all of the methods," Dohmen says. "There is an infinite supply out there. We're the ones supposed to be on top of it."

Sometimes that means knowing new construction materials. Concrete block walls have given way to foam walls and metal panels. The designs must change.

What sets Design Styles apart are its functional designs.

"Staying in business doesn't mean making pretty pictures that you don't know how they go together," Dohmen says. "Something I find is key is meeting with the client and builder, taking a lot of time to sweat out the details. We follow the instructions and follow the plans. I constantly take our guys into the field. I'll say, 'Don't draw it like this. We need architecture that is easy to build. Make sure the client is spending the right money.'"

Revenues recently have been around $2 million, and have risen 10% to 25% annually in the past five years.

"Historically we have always grown, sometimes aggressively grown," he says. "Knock on wood, we've had no need to lay people off. There has been big time slashing people in the industry."

Referrals bring in about 90% of the firm's business. "Word gets out," Dohmen says.

When he's not running Design Styles, Dohmen, a Long Island native, is with his family, which includes two children, 20 and 17.

REVIEW SUMMARY

Company: Design Styles Architecture

Industry: Architecture

Key: Transition from home design to commercial work, but still to do affordable housing design.