Bennett Partners

Bennett Partners is an architecture, interiors and planning firm of about 30 people working from studios in Fort Worth and Dallas. The practice covers architecture, interior design, planning and urban design, with a pronounced strand of historic preservation and adaptive reuse running through its Fort Worth work. Projects include the Center for Transforming Lives, the Armour Building and Come to Good at Keith House, all in Fort Worth. The firm operates an employee stock ownership program. Its current adaptive reuse work includes architecture and interiors for the conversion of the landmarked 1952 Oncor Building at 115 West 7th Street in downtown Fort Worth into roughly 330 apartments, a project that keeps the mid-century brick exterior intact while rebuilding 16 floors behind it.

Three principles are posted on the firm’s about page, and they work as a filter on everything in the portfolio: the work should feel rooted in its local context, each project should respond to and enhance the lives of the people it touches, and the result should leave a lasting positive effect on the community it belongs to. That is a fair description of a practice whose commissions cluster in one metro rather than scattering across the country.

Beyond the adaptive reuse work the studio is best known for, the portfolio is filed under civic, community, corporate and commercial, education, historic and adaptive reuse, hospitality, interiors, multi-family, planning and urban design, and private homes. Named projects include the Fort Worth Stockyards horse and mule barns, the Fort Worth Convention Center, Palo Pinto Mountain State Park, Overton Park Elementary School, The Knox, Thompson’s Bookstore and the Watson Residence. Interior design runs as a service in its own right, offered either alongside the architecture team or separately, covering programming and finish selection through furniture and art installation. The planning practice reaches further than site layout: the firm cites comprehensive master planning for new town developments, business and industrial parks and research and development centers, urban design for mixed-use commercial developments, and downtown revitalization plans.

The roster carries AIA, RID, RIBA, LEED AP and WELL AP credentials, led by Michael J. Bennett as executive partner and chief executive, with senior partners Amanda Schulte and Samantha Garbarino, the latter serving as senior design director in Fort Worth, and partners including April Coover, Jenna Coffaro, Robert Lee as technology director and Sarah McLaughlin on the interiors side. Work is split between a west studio at 640 Taylor Street in downtown Fort Worth and an east studio at 2401 Cedar Springs in Dallas. The community page is the clearest signal of where the firm’s civic relationships sit: it lists dozens of Fort Worth and Tarrant County institutions the practice supports, among them the Kimbell Art Museum, the Modern Art Museum, the Fort Worth Botanic Garden, the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, Historic Fort Worth, Downtown Fort Worth Inc., the Tarrant Area Food Bank, Presbyterian Night Shelter, Lena Pope and the Center for Transforming Lives, which is also a client. The firm recruits for project architect roles on the basis that candidates understand how small details affect a larger whole.