WE BELIEVE CONTEXTUAL DESIGN HAS THE
POWER TO ELEVATE THE HUMAN SPIRIT.

Cultural

Since the founding of our firm, work with museums and cultural institutions has been one of our core markets. Whether for museums, historic sites, visitor centers or cultural arts organizations, Glavé & Holmes has developed expertise in planning and design for visitor-oriented facilities at any scale. We understand that these properties and facilities have multi-faceted and unique missions. They reflect the culture and personality of communities while serving as places to explore and better understand our collective identity, knowledge, and experience. In this area of arts and culture, our clients include numerous institutions that have achieved national and international recognition.

Hospitality

For more than 30 years, Glavé & Holmes has partnered with premier hotels and resorts across the country. We specialize in celebrating the heritage of buildings or locations while creating designs that meet the needs and expectations of modern travelers. We collaborate with our clients’ management teams to address every requirement of a truly remarkable destination, providing thoughtful planning to support management and staff in their delivery of superior service for their guests. Our architects and interior designers bring decades of exceptional design, procurement, and project management experience to each project. Aesthetic and practical considerations, undertaken in the spirit of stewardship, create timeless designs that are tailored to fit within each building’s unique context.

Residential

Home is at the center of our lives. The design of one’s home touches upon the quintessential elements of what makes us human.  Understanding this, our team closely collaborates with residential clients to carefully craft spaces that thoughtfully reflect their personal values, needs, and tastes. Whether building a new home, renovating, or enlarging an existing structure, Glavé & Holmes provides exceptional attention to detail and offers experience with a variety of home typologies.  We can guide clients through the process, serving as trusted advisors from the first conversation about the vision to the final placement of family heirlooms in the home.

Higher Education

Glavé & Holmes has been a leader in serving higher education institutions for decades. Our teams provide expertise in the planning, design and preservation of an array of facilities for colleges and universities, including flexible teaching and learning spaces; student housing; dining halls; administrative offices; and campus hospitality such as conference facilities, visitor centers, and guest accommodations. Sustainability and beauty are a consistent focus as we partner with institutions to craft an enduring vision for their campuses. Many of our projects for universities are enhanced by our expertise in historic preservation as we transform outdated facilities to serve the needs of a modern academic environment. Our work demonstrates experience with the architectural challenge of creatively embracing the needs and expectations of students and faculty, while sensibly responding to both limited resources and the regional context of the university and the surrounding community.

Independent Schools

Glavé & Holmes has a sustained commitment to creating educational environments that foster growth, creativity, and academic excellence. Leveraging best practices from the higher education sector, our team collaborates with private K-12 schools across the country. We understand that independent schools often have unique missions, visions, and campus needs; our firm provides a tailored approach to help each school realize their vision for education through thoughtful planning and design for new, enlarged, or renovated facilities. We also offer experience in comprehensive campus master planning, which ensures that growth and development align with long-term strategic goals and available resources.

Civic & Community

Great towns and cities are made up of buildings and public spaces that support our life together – places where we gather, live, work and build community. Through the creation of contextual urban architecture, the Civic & Community Studio seeks to enhance human flourishing with beautiful and innovative designs that converse with the surrounding environment. While serving both the public and private sectors, we believe that we have a responsibility to create places that meet the basic needs of human habitation and enhance the public discourse of our towns and cities.

ARCHITECTURE

Enduring architecture creates inspiring spaces that evoke wonder and shape the identity of a community. We believe in a collaborative approach, working closely with clients and project stakeholders to craft harmonious, beautiful, and functional buildings tailored to their specific contexts. By embracing the full spectrum of human experience and cultural traditions, our designs adapt these legacies for future generations. 

PRESERVATION

Our firm is known nationally for our profound commitment to and experience in historic preservation and restoration. Founder Jim Glavé was instrumental in saving many historic buildings in Richmond’s core, and his influential work has led to five decades of championing historic preservation and adaptive reuse projects, including numerous National Historic Landmark properties and Certified Historic Rehabilitation projects.

INTERIOR DESIGN

We believe that architecture and interior design should be woven together seamlessly. Our interior designers, who are multi-faceted experts in their fields, partner with clients and the architectural team to deliver an integrated and rigorous program. From conceptual design to project management to installation, our interior design team emphasizes functional planning and discernment of how environments impact the people who use them.

PLANNING

Planning is central to the enduring nature of great design. We view planning as the synthesis of design elements involving natural and constructed resources – bringing together landscape design, sustainability initiatives, building guidelines and economic parameters to establish a framework for places people enjoy. Our experience involves planning for resilient and sustainable places that are designed to have a lasting impact. 

Elevating the Human Spirit, the Architecture of Glavé & Holmes compiles the work of a firm that has, for over fifty years, celebrated and studied the values and principles that gave rise to the rich and uniquely American traditions in architecture. Fascination with this legacy of tradition, which has shaped the cities, towns, villages, and landscapes of the nation – particularly in the Southeast – began with the firm’s founders and remains a strong pulse in the firm’s work today.

This pulse, a deep undercurrent linking historic preservation, adaptive reuse, architectural creation, and interior design has yielded a portfolio of projects that exemplify ideologies about placemaking, cultural conservation, timeless contextualism, and traditional design while remaining creative and modern in reinterpretation and relevance. This book was envisioned to chronicle and celebrate projects executed during the firm’s first 50 years (1965-2015), honors the firm’s past, and looks to the future as Glavé & Holmes continues its mission to connect people to places in such a way as to elevate the human spirit.

The book is written by H. Randolph Holmes, Jr. with Henrika Dyck Taylor.

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