Niles Bolton Associates

Niles Bolton Associates is an Atlanta architecture, interior design, landscape architecture and planning firm founded in 1975, when Niles Bolton started the practice out of his house. It now works across 49 states and 16 countries from offices in Atlanta and Arlington, Virginia, with 22 partners and a staff in the low hundreds. The firm is best known for large-scale residential and mixed-use work, and designed the 1996 Olympic Village in Atlanta and the nation’s first LEED-certified apartment community in Silver Spring, Maryland. Its student housing portfolio includes Flamingo Crossings Village near Orlando, a 10,440-bed campus for the Disney College Program, and the 833-bed, 11-storey University of Tampa residence hall now going up at 110 South Boulevard.

NBA’s own history page tells the growth story in small increments rather than milestones. Bill vonHedemann, a college roommate of Niles Bolton, joined early, and despite the economy the practice made enough headway to move out of the house and into offices on Mathieson Drive. Incorporation came with the staff reaching double digits, which mattered more then than it reads now: at the time only ten Atlanta firms had more than twenty people. A roughly 25 percent growth rate through the late eighties pushed the office again, to its current space in One Buckhead Plaza. On the Virginia side, the studio spent almost forty years in Old Town Alexandria before relocating to Arlington.

Sustainability became a measurable line of work rather than a claim. Since completing the first LEED certified apartment community, the firm reports designing five million more sustainable square feet, with 60 percent of its design professionals LEED accredited.

The four disciplines are run as one team rather than as separate departments. Architecture takes the lead and integrates exterior and interior space; interior design participates in conceptual development rather than arriving at the finishes stage; landscape architecture handles the external environment as part of the same effort; and the planning group takes on site and building analysis and plots the route through the regulatory process, working out how buildings sit within a neighbourhood alongside public space, rail and roads.

Student housing is the firm’s strongest single market. Building Design + Construction ranked NBA number one for student housing in its 2025 rankings of the largest US architecture firms, the fourth consecutive year in that position. Phase I of the University of Tennessee Knoxville on-campus housing, designed by NBA and developed by RISE, earned an SHB Innovator Award for Best P3, delivering close to 2,000 beds on an accelerated timeline.

Recent published work spans more than housing: Rambler Atlanta, Station Yards in Ronkonkoma, New York, and the Tempo by Hilton in Savannah’s historic district. The firm ran a twelve-student internship programme across its Atlanta and Washington DC studios in 2026.