My eldest son turned five today. Which means that Frost Architecture and Design turned five recently too; two things brought into the world in the same year, both still growing, both still surprising.
Five years feels like a moment worth marking, if only to stop long enough to look back at what it has actually been.
The practice has run around young children, a working farm, and a life that was never going to re-organise itself around a business getting started. This is not the conventional path for building an architecture practice. It is the slower one and yet, it is also somewhat a more honest one.
The work has had to fit around the life, which has meant being selective about what we take on and deliberate about how we spend the hours we have. That constraint has shaped the practice in ways I'm grateful for; it has kept us focused on work that actually matters to us, and it has meant that every project taken on has had our full attention rather than a fraction of it.
The relationships built through this work are as meaningful as the buildings themselves.
What we want to mark this milestone with, more than anything, is gratitude for our clients.
Architecture is an unusually intimate profession. When someone brings a project to an architect, they're not purchasing a service in the ordinary sense. They're letting someone into something that matters; their home, land and plans for how they want to live. They're trusting a relative stranger with decisions that will shape their daily life for decades. Every client who has brought a project to us over the last five years has done something that we don't take lightly: they took a chance on a small business in a regional area, at the beginning of a practice, without a showy portfolio, and they gave us the opportunity to do work we genuinely care about.
We are grateful for all of them, and one moment from the last five years has stayed with us particularly.
A recently completed project; the details of which belong to the client and not to this page, involved weekly site meetings throughout the construction phase. The Architect,, the Builder, the client. What started as a professional rhythm gradually became something we all looked forward to. An unofficial morning tea club. We took turns buying the coffee. We talked about the project and about everything else. The site meetings were productive; the morning teas were something more than that.
It was a reminder of something we already knew but sometimes lose sight of in the ordinary business of running a practice: the relationships are as much the point as the buildings. We love the creativity of this work; the design thinking, the problem-solving, the particular satisfaction of a detail that works exactly as it should. But it is the people; the clients who take a risk on good design, the consultants who genuinely work as a team, the builders who care about doing it properly, the conversations over coffee on a construction site on a cold New England morning, who make this profession worth building a life around.
Five years in we're still here, still learning and still grateful for every project that has come through the door.
Here's to the next five.
