Centerbrook Architects and Planners

Centerbrook Architects and Planners is an employee-owned architecture firm founded in 1975 and headquartered at 67 Main Street in Centerbrook, Connecticut. The practice works across cultural, academic, scientific and residential buildings, with a long record in museum and campus projects throughout the Northeast. Centerbrook was design architect for the $200 million renovation and expansion of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, which reopened in March 2024 with a 57,631-square-foot infill addition threaded between two existing buildings and 50 percent more exhibition space. The project was certified LEED Gold and took an AIA Architecture Award in June 2026. The firm also has extensive laboratory and research facility experience.

The office itself is part of the story. Centerbrook works out of a nineteenth-century compound of factory buildings alongside a millstream on the Connecticut shoreline — a site that has used waterpower since 1690, making it one of the earliest Industrial Revolution locations in America. The firm still generates electricity there with a modern turbine, and the brick walls, rough wood floors and open bays are the studio itself rather than a converted showpiece.

Project management runs on an in-house system the practice calls The Centerbrook Method, a road map for quality and budget assurance built over four decades of construction. Design starts by reconciling program, site, fundraising, budget and implementation, and the firm is blunt about the order of things: solving a project’s functional requirements is treated as an absolute prerequisite before any architectural honour can be deserved.

The other habit worth knowing about is the participatory workshop. Stakeholders and eventual users are brought in early to identify design options and register preferences. Those sessions have ranged from modest meetings to interactive television programmes that pulled entire urban populations into planning their own cities.

Architecture work is sorted into academic, commercial, cultural, residential, sacred, science and sports buildings, with a separate planning group covering campus planning, feasibility and urban design. Several capabilities are offered as services in their own right: fundraising support, furniture and fixtures, graphic design, interior design, project management, sustainable design and visualization.

Tenure is unusually long — several staff have been with the firm more than thirty years — while the architects themselves come from across the United States and from many countries, which the practice credits for the range of influence in its work.

Enquiries are routed by subject: business to Chris Hill, employment to Justin Hedde, press and speaking to Cynthia Kinlock, and the product library to Sheryl Milardo. The office is at 67 Main Street, PO Box 955, Centerbrook, Connecticut 06409, on (860) 767-0175.