Growing Companies

Started all the way back in 1937 by Cyrus L. Baxter, BHDP has been creating spaces that are not only aesthetically pleasing, but also focus on the way space interacts with people and drives results.

Named after Baxter and his partners’, Jack Hodell, Jim Donnelly and Jim Preston, last names, BHDP has been growing over the past 75 years. Now with nearly 100 employees and offices in Columbus and Raleigh and an employee stationed in London, the architecture firm works closely with its clients to design spaces that create an atmosphere, tailored specifically for each client.

With a model based on expertise, BHDP, works to design environments that effects behavior.

“At the end of the day, we want to help our clients achieve strategic results,” says Jay Rottinghaus, director of sales and marketing at BHDP. “It takes more than knowing how to design a building. You have to understand people.”

BHDP focuses on five main areas of work; workplace, science, retail, higher education and environmental graphic design. From 3CDC to P&G to over 25 colleges and universities in Ohio, BHDP works with some of the top companies in the world with services from architecture to interior design.

“We are blessed to work with best-in-class clients,” Rottinghaus says. “We work with several Fortune 100 companies so we push ourselves to stay ahead of the crowd.”

Many of those companies are based out of Cincinnati and BHDP has been building relationships with the companies as they grow, which in turn helped put BHDP on the architecture map. BHDP moved downtown in 2002 to be closer to the urban core and become threaded into the fabric of Cincinnati.

Now nationally recognized as a top architecture firm, BHDP continues to provide the same results they always have. BHDP works to holistically understand their client’s employees, their process, and then approach the design collaboratively, both internally and with input from their clients.

“If you do those three things well, we will provide strategic results for our clients,” Rottinghaus says.  “But if you don’t do one of them, the equation falls apart. You have to understand people and their process.”

That understanding of people is where BHDP tries to stand apart from other architecture firms. BHDP fundamentally believes that the space people work in influences how they work. Once figuring out how people need to work, BHDP then works to design a space that encourages the desired results.

“It’s not about architecture for the sake of architecture,” Rottinghaus says. “It’s about creating a space that people can function at their best.”

By Evan Wallis