After recession’s wrecking ball, Connecticut architects clear rebuilding phase

By Alexander Soule and Macaela J. Bennett

Updated 4:49 pm, Wednesday, May 24, 2017

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A Trillium Architects-designed home on Dolphin Cove Cove Quay in Stamford, Conn. (Photo permission of Trillium Architects; photo by David Lindsey, Advanced Photographix, www.aphotographix.com)

In mid-May, a year after the keys were handed over to the owners of the new Dolphin Cove home on Stamford’s waterfront that represents a model of sustainability, Elizabeth DiSalvo revisited the handiwork of her Trillium Architects.

It was not so many years before that sustainability was as much on her mind for Trillium itself.

Between 2008 and 2010, revenue from architectural services fell 29 percent, or $11.2 billion, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent annual estimates. Even by the standards of the recession, that was a big number — just seven industries had declines that were more severe of some 325 tracked by the Census Bureau (two of the others being landscape architecture and interior design firms).

While architects tallied gains five straight years after 2010, the $34.9 billion in revenue they generated in 2015 was still 9 percent below the high-water mark in 2008.

The recession “was devastating to the architectural profession, both nationally and locally,” said Richard Granoff, founder of Greenwich-based Granoff Architects, which handles both commercial and residential work. Granoff said his firm fared better than most, but said many endured layoffs or outright closure.

Since the downturn, Granoff has seen “steady, modest growth” in his business, he said. The most noticeable sign of his firm’s success is located at 330 Railroad Ave., where Granoff Architects recently moved into an $8 million headquarters following a gutting and renovation of the historic building previously owned by Eversource Energy. Granoff plans to lease space there to other businesses, as well.

DiSalvo moved Trillium in 2012 to Ridgefield, where she lives, and is now looking to add to her staff of four full-time design professionals. In the decade prior to 2012, the firm had its offices in South Norwalk, where Trillium experienced the pendulum extremes of the boom-bust economy.

“The fall of 2012 was when things started coming back,” DiSalvo recalled. “During the recession, a lot of people stopped being architects.”

George Wiles, principal of Bridgeport-based Wiles Architects, has endured multiple recessions in the 40 years since he founded the company. A few years after the most recent downturn, new commercial construction had yet to resume and Wiles found his firm “doing renovations to the shopping centers we built 20 years ago,” in his words.

Bridgeport-based Antinozzi Associates led all southwestern Connecticut firms on Architectural Record’s most recent rankings of the top 300 firms in the nation, reporting 2015 revenue of $8 million, a 20 percent bump from the prior year. The pipeline is filling for other industry stalwarts, as well, including Beinfield Architecture, which has multiple major projects under way such as the redesign of the 9 W. Broad St. office building completed last year and the University of Connecticut-Stamford’s first dormitory.

“We’re a relatively small architectural firm with 10 employees, so these projects represent a large portion of our work,” said Bruce Beinfield, principal. “Stamford’s particularly dynamic because they’ve had such a large influx of residential uses into the downtown. ... They’re very cognizant of all the implications of that.”

Resumed growth throughout southwestern Connecticut has led to the emergence of startup firms, including Danbury’s seventy2architects. Founders Maura Newell Juan and Emmanuel Juan kept overhead low in the early going by operating out of a home office before opening a location in downtown Danbury as project work picked up, including from a burgeoning restaurant scene in downtown Danbury.

“We are doing a lot of tear-downs and dramatic renovations and expansions,” she said. “The requests are more dramatic than people had been brave enough to do eight years ago.”

Back in Stamford, Trillium client Gunilla Falkman-Vickers says she is thrilled with the firm’s Scandinavian-inspired design for the Dolphin Cove home she and her husband, Leonard, moved into a year ago from Norwalk’s Wilson Point enclave. On a May afternoon, light from Long Island Sound flooded the home, with the design a testament to the “hyper-sustainable” ethic that is Trillium’s niche specialty — with the home a testimonial as well to DiSalvo’s perseverance through the dark days of the recession.

“My energy bills are a fraction of what they were,” Falkman-Vickers said.

— Includes reporting by Chris Bosak, Paul Schott and Keila Torres Ocasio.

Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-354-1047; www.twitter.com/casoulman