Deborah Richmond Architects

We are a nonprofit agency that was presented with a unique capital project dilemma; building a commercial kitchen for foster youth in South Los Angeles who are extremely transient. Debbie and her team listened attentively to our needs, and those of our youth, to develop a masterful plan that honored the foster youth experience. The result is an adaptable, mobile, commercial kitchen trailer space that can travel the city to meet foster youth wherever they find themselves. The design has attracted committed support from foundations, corporations, political leadership and the larger nonprofit community. I strongly recommend Deborah Richmond architects for their attention to details and truly honoring the unique needs of their clients.

Deborah Richmond designed the addition to our 1914 Minneapolis home in 2006-07, which is called the Plug and Play House. Brilliant in its plan and response to a difficult and restricted site, the addition houses a two-plus car garage on the ground floor and, on the second floor, a master bedroom suite, with a bathroom and study. An elegant, classically modernist building--filled with light, refined in its details, energy efficient (in-floor radiant heat, a split-system air conditioner), and not without a certain whimsy (in the best sense of the term)--it relates both visually and functionally to the older existing house, but without any flaccid post-modernist contextualism. It is an open, airy, and luminous space in a bold and richly textured envelope (the exterior combines concrete panels and board-and-batten wood cladding). It is, as our neighbor (CEO of a major architectural firm) described it, "the most exciting domestic architecture to appear in Minneapolis in decades."