ADW Architects

ADW Architects is a Charlotte architecture, planning and interior design firm founded in 1977. It works out of Six Coliseum Centre on the city’s south side and keeps a second studio in Raleigh. The portfolio leans public: K-12 schools, higher education, civic buildings and public safety, with faith-based, entertainment, office, mixed-use, retail and restaurant work rounding it out. Its past public safety jobs include Charlotte Fire Station No. 42, a LEED Gold building. ADW is the architect on Charlotte’s Firehouse 44, a two-story, three-bay mass timber station in the River District that Samet is delivering as design-builder. The city broke ground on the $23.3 million, 14,000-square-foot station on Oct. 8, 2026, and it’s targeting zero carbon.

Project staffing is set out plainly on the firm’s leadership page, which is more useful to a prospective client than most firm-culture writing. Every ADW team is assembled the same way: a managing principal, team leaders or project managers, project architects, project architect assistants, interior designers, and construction contract administrators. Principal involvement is direct rather than nominal, and the firm carries five managing principals, three senior principals and three principals, several holding LEED AP, CDT, CSI, CCS and CCCA credentials alongside architectural registration.

That depth of principals relative to firm size is what makes the staffing model work: there are enough of them for each project to have one assigned rather than shared.

Work is organised into eight project types: K-12 education, higher education, civic, public safety, faith-based, entertainment, office and mixed use, and retail and restaurant. The weighting toward public clients — schools, civic buildings, fire and police facilities — shapes how the practice is run, since those projects are procured, scheduled and budgeted differently from private commercial work.

The stated design philosophy is phrased as “environments for life”, meaning the firm judges a building by how it affects the daily experience of the people using it rather than by its appearance alone. Over 40 years of research and project experience sit behind that, and the firm commits to on-time and on-budget delivery as part of the same proposition.