February 24, 2023

Karen Bowery to retire after 40 trailblazing years at Ankrom Moisan

Photo by Filo Canseco courtesy of Ankrom Moisan [enlarge]

Bowery is pictured, center, with her colleagues and successors Alissa Brandt (left) and Leah Wheary Brown (right).

Karen Bowery, Executive Vice President and Director of Interiors of Ankrom Moisan Architects, will retire from the firm and her role in The Society (which focuses exclusively on interior design for the hospitality industry) on Feb. 28, 2023.

Bowery will turn over leadership of Ankrom Moisan's Interiors group to Alissa Brandt and Leah Wheary Brown, who have worked alongside her for 22 and 19 years, respectively. Casey Scalf, a design principal and founding member, will become the director of The Society when Bowery retires.

It's fitting that Bowery's retirement comes right before the start of Women's History Month in March as she has been a trailblazer in the interior design field. In 1978, she was one of only ten students to graduate from what was then the new Interior Design program at University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Bowery left the school determined to elevate and solidify the reputation of interior designers as more than just decorators, and for the practice to be respected as an integral part of the overall project design process. “It was a new profession and we had no roadmap to follow,” Bowery shared during a recent interview. “But I wanted to ensure that interior design was no longer viewed as an afterthought,” she continued.

Bowery launched the Interiors group at Ankrom Moisan when the firm was first founded in 1983 and soon became one of only four board-members. Today, Ankrom Moisan's Interiors Group has 72 employees and offices in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. Along with her leadership role with Ankrom Moisan, in 2016, Bowery launched The Society to focus exclusively on interior design for the hospitality industry.

During our interview, Bowery shared some of the major changes that she has seen in the profession over her storied career. “When I started, interior design was almost completely driven by the building program and different programs had typical interior design patterns,” she said. “Nothing was based on branding or culture and certainly not on the experience of the people who would be interacting with the space,” she continued. “Now design is more user-focused and based on experience and emotions,” Bowery explained. “We design to make a lasting impression,” ... “When guests walk into a space, they should feel like they are meant to be there, that it is a place that defines them, supports their unique perspective, and honors their lived experience.”

Bowery has been pivotal to this shift, having always been driven by a desire to gain an expansive upfront understanding of the space, its locale, and the lifestyle and behavior patterns of the end-user. In a press release, Ankrom Moisan explained how she established a protocol in which the firm's interiors team of any given project invests expertise at the forefront to fully understand the end-user, consumer trends, the uniqueness of the locale and, in particular, what the return on investment will be for the client.

Bowery's work and legacy can be seen in local projects that include interiors at the Skamania Lodge in the Columbia River Gorge, and at Aegis Living's newest community in Eastlake, which is heavily inspired by the history of Lake Union and in particular the gold-medal winning American 1936 Olympic team from the University of Washington, also known as the Boys in the Boat, who trained on the lake.

Beginning in the 1990s, Bowery was instrumental in the transition of Portland's Pearl District from abandoned rail yards and warehouses to vibrant neighborhoods. She also created a unit customization program and pushed for staffing the sales offices of Pearl District projects in Portland and South Lake Union projects in Seattle with Ankrom Moisan designers to help buyers customize their units, a practice that was not being used previously but which has now become the norm.

“I'm extremely excited to further the legacy that Karen created,” Brandt said in the press release. “This is a time of constant change and staying stagnant isn't an option. That's what is most exciting about interior design – it's never going to be the same, even when you're working with the same client. There's always an evolution, and Karen has consistently kept Ankrom Moisan at the forefront.”

“We are committed to continuing Karen's legacy of designing for people over program and of experience driven design,” Wheary Brown added.

“I always say that the best way to predict the future is to create it,” Bowery concluded.