Merritt + Pardini Architects

Owners: Lee Pardini, Rob Berman, Scott Harm and Dave Thomas
Specialty: Transit, industrial and municipal projects
2000 revenues: $5.2 million
2001 projected revenues: $6.5 million
Largest current projects: Tacoma Convention Center with MulvannyG2 Architects and Stadium High School renovation with Bassetti Architects

Stadium High School
Stadium High School

With the prospect of leaner days ahead, it helps to have history on your side.

“When we get clients, we keep them for a long time,” says Dave Thomas, managing partner for the Seattle office of Merritt + Pardini Architects. “The clients we’ve had for many, many years ... have learned to trust our knowledge and guidance. If they have projects coming up that are sitting on the fence, they’ll come to us and ask, ‘What should we do?’"

Merritt + Pardini is enjoying an “above average year,” says Thomas. “We’ve already come close to exceeding our sales goal.”

However, after adding a half-dozen employees this year for a total of 45, Merritt + Pardini is expecting a return to average next year in the wake of gloomy economic tidings such as state budget cuts and Boeing layoffs.

“We’re just going to have to wait and see ... how the market reacts,” says Thomas.

About 90 percent of Merritt + Pardini’s work comes from the public sector and the firm has a healthy backlog of projects, notes Thomas. For example, after completing master plans for new municipal campuses in Redmond and Poulsbo, it is awaiting contracts for their design.

Current projects include designs for the renovation of Stadium High School in Tacoma and for the new Tacoma Convention Center (Merritt + Pardini is the lead architect in collaboration with MulvannyG2).

Thomas calls the 250,000-square-foot convention center a landmark project. It includes a 400-foot stainless steel tower with an observation deck. “It will be an icon for downtown Tacoma,” says Thomas.

As a hedge against public spending cutbacks, Merritt + Pardini will broaden its scope and begin pursuing more private sector projects such as hotels, says Thomas.

“We’re going to press ahead in the areas we’re good at and look at diversification into areas that we have the talent to go into,” he says.

“The adjustments we make now will set us up for the next couple of years.”

In the current climate, Thomas has noticed greater emphasis on value engineering. Clients want projects that are extremely functional and don’t want to spend money in “areas where some designers get carried away,” says Thomas.

“One of our clients recently took a lot of design elements out of a project, like skylights. That’s a pretty basic example, but that’s what we’re seeing.”

A key to the firm’s past and future success is monitoring potential projects and “prepositioning” itself to get its foot in the door — and a leg up on the competition — when clients are ready to move ahead, says Thomas. He says he recently landed an interview with a client “because I’d been tracking them for 12 months and they knew who we were.”



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