June 6, 2017

Architect uses the cloud to link his staff, clients and projects anywhere

Schlachter

Architect Paul Schlachter's new Seattle firm is doing projects here as well as in Oregon, California and Utah, but don't expect him to have offices in those places — at least not in the traditional sense.

Apollo Design Studio works in the cloud, as in cloud computing.

Schlachter launched the collaborative architectural practice in October, after working for more than a decade at Olson Kundig in Seattle.

Apollo Design Studio focuses on high-end housing as well as office and hospitality projects. It contracts with other architects in Los Angeles, Sacramento and Salt Lake City, and with a draftsperson in Pretoria, South Africa.

Schlachter works out of his home and a small office in Bellevue.

He and the contractors use Amazon Web Services to log on from anywhere in the world, and share documents, programs and projects.

“I work mostly by phone and by Skype and by Google Hangouts and WebEx and GoToMeeting,” said Schlachter. “I am in meetings all the time, but it's not location dependent.”

Typically, Schlachter has an initial meeting with clients, and goes on site visits. “I am on a plane once or twice a week right now.”

Schlachter generates the initial design. His contractors review permitting and construction, and work with him on schematic design.

“I think the product is still the same,” he said. “The communication is still the same. You're just allowing yourself the freedom to collect good people where you find them.”

Apollo saves on office space and other costs, and passes on the savings to clients, he said.

Current projects include a 10,000-square-foot adaptive reuse of the Honald Building, a historic structure in The Dalles, Oregon; a house in Healdsburg, California; a mixed-use apartment building in West Seattle; and a 68,000-square-foot addition to Goldener Hirsch Inn & Residences, a boutique hotel in Park City, Utah.

Travis Dillard owns the Honald Building. Schlachter visited the site, and they met once to talk, but Dillard said, “Everything else has been collaborative: document sharing, file sharing, video conferencing.”

The project will restore the building and create nine apartments. Schlachter will go there once or twice again, and construction is slated for this summer.

Dillard's company, Inflow Communications.com, sells collaborative communications services. The company is virtual, with employees all over the country.

“I just think it's where the world's going in a lot of areas, a lot of sectors, especially in the professional services world,” he said. “Paul, he's a trailblazer in the architect space.”

Dillard, who lives in Woodinville, met Schlachter on a flight last summer and they talked about doing business virtually.

An architect's work speaks for itself, Dillard said. “I don't need to see (an architect's office) that somebody had to invest $300,000 in tenant improvements in to make it look pretty, with cool art and ping pong tables.”

As cloud computing becomes easier to use, Schlachter said more companies see its value. He compares it to shopping online: “People used to be scared of it, and now it's second nature.”

The shift to the cloud is happening in architecture, he said, with some larger firms making the switch because they're tired of managing or paying for a server network.

“Smaller ones like me — there aren't many yet,” he said.

The biggest problem is too few data centers, he said. For instance, Singapore is the closest one for Apollo's draftsperson in South Africa, so there's a lag, he said. He said she only uses the cloud for data transfer and information sharing, and does her work on a local hard drive.

Schlachter was a marketing coordinator for Mithun from 1992-1996, and worked as a project manager for Bosworth Studio from 1999 to 2001 and for Bohlin Cywinski Jackson from 2001 to 2004. He was an associate doing project management from 2004 to 2016 with Olson Kundig, which is best known for high-end housing.

He said after a 25-year career, he was ready to go out on his own. “It was time to take a little bit more ownership in the design process.”

After 12 years working under Tom Kundig, he said, “I felt like I'd earned my wings. So it was time to spread them.”

He said the most interesting thing he learned from Kundig is that designs should always have a level of tension. “Things could be unbalanced and still be good.”

Schlachter's previous work includes residential and commercial projects in Washington, California, Utah, Nebraska, Texas and New York. He was project architect for the Casey Family Programs headquarters and Thompson Hotel in Seattle, and False Bay Writer's Cabin on San Juan Island.

The architect said he wants to expand Apollo's work into Texas and Nebraska, where there's a market for high-end housing. In the long run, he said he would like to be able to tell clients he has people in Salt Lake City, Los Angeles and Dallas, “and wherever else I want to grow.”

Schlachter, whose middle name is Haley, owned Paul Haley Furniture from 1996-1999, and later designed furniture for Mithun and Olson Kundig, where he learned a lot about craft. Those lessons — in how things fit together and the relationship between pieces that make the whole better — have informed his approach to architecture, he said.

“Things like proportion are critical in a door handle and in a 12-story building, and the same philosophies apply to both. Once you have an understanding of proportion, scale and texture,” he said, “it's expandable or reducible.”

Schlachter said he got into architecture because he likes problem solving. “There's nothing more exciting for me than that beginning point when anything is possible.”

Like opening a design firm.