Garvin Design Group

Garvin Design Group is an architecture and interior design firm founded in 2003 in Columbia, South Carolina, where it started in the historic AIS Building at Lincoln and Gervais streets and still keeps its office on Lincoln Street. Its portfolio runs through higher education, K-12, civic, hospitality, religious, historic and residential work, much of it across the Midlands. The firm has a long run of Coastal Carolina University jobs, including the Thompson Library. On CCU’s $75 million Health and Human Performance Building in Conway, an 85,000-square-foot, three-story academic building now under construction, Garvin is architect of record and interior designer, working alongside design architect Flad Architects and construction manager Hood Construction.

The service list extends past drawing buildings. Master planning and feasibility studies sit alongside architecture and interior design, and historic preservation consulting is offered as its own discipline rather than folded into renovation work. An owner weighing whether a site can take what they have in mind can buy the study without committing to the design that might follow.

Preservation runs through the practice. Historic is one of eight project categories, next to civic, commercial, higher education, hospitality, K-12 education, religious and residential, and the studio’s own account of its growth traces a path from small early commissions into historic rehabilitations.

The tally the firm keeps on itself is worth reading: more than 645 projects, over eighty awards, and in excess of two billion dollars in cumulative project experience. Two of those awards stand out, both from 2019 and 2020 respectively: the AIA Firm Award, which recognizes a practice rather than a building, and the Columbia Chamber’s Small Business of the Year. A firm can collect design awards without the former.

The founding group had worked with Scott Garvin before the practice was formed, which explains how a studio opened with a working team rather than assembling one. Work has since spread out of the Midlands into the rest of South Carolina and beyond, though the office has stayed put on Lincoln Street in downtown Columbia.

For anyone curious about what the studio is actually working on, it posts to TikTok, which is still unusual for an architecture practice of this size and makes the day-to-day easier to see than a portfolio page allows.