Searl Lamaster Howe Architects

Searl Lamaster Howe Architects is a Chicago-based architectural office that specializes in making inspiring spaces where people live, work, play, and learn. Rigorous collaboration during design and construction underlies this office's portfolio, ensuring exceptional quality. The aesthetic of each project evolves from a thorough exploration of programmatic needs, context, technological possibilities, and budgetary constraints. This studio commits itself at the high levels of creativity, innovation, sustainability, attention to detail, and material integrity.

Their portfolio features a diversity of work in commercial, residential, and institutional development—from masterful comprehensive planning and renovation to meticulous restorations and leading-edge new constructions. Searl Lamaster Howe Architects is certified as a state-level Female Business Enterprise and a Chicago Women Business Enterprise, working coast-to-coast and internationally with a hands-on approach to every project.

The process at Searl Lamaster Howe Architects starts with an understanding of the clients' requirements, concerns, and transposing those into a vision, marshaling resources to bring that vision into reality from conception to construction administration, and providing post-occupancy support. They are dedicated to offering design solutions in service of each client's particular objectives and contextual challenges, as reflected in the diversity of their work. Some of the core principles driving this philosophy include a collaborative atmosphere, the application of systematic design methodology, and a quest for a space to be contemporary yet timeless, inspirational, innovative, sustainable, responsible, and functional.

Searl Lamaster Howe Architects has learned that the real quality of space is much more than the façade of a building. Accordingly, architecture and interior design are appropriated at an intrinsic level. Be it self-managed projects or those worked on together with independent interior designers, the idea is to create an environment with one vision and to meet its specific character.