Hanbury

Hanbury is an architecture, planning and interior design firm founded in 1979 and headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, with additional offices in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Raleigh, Dallas and San Francisco. Much of its practice is campus work, including student housing, academic buildings and long-range campus plans for colleges and universities, alongside multifamily, civic and cultural projects. The firm is architect on 3200 West Moore Street in Richmond, a $144 million, 366-unit mixed-use building filling a full city block in Scott’s Addition for Hoffman & Associates and DeBartolo Development. Hanbury describes the design as a deliberate rework of standard mid-rise multifamily massing to strengthen how the building meets the street, with delivery targeted for early 2028.

Hanbury is structured as a 100 percent employee-owned company, a detail the firm treats as central to how it operates rather than as a footnote — its own language describes shared stewardship as ensuring growth stays inclusive and reflective of the people doing the work. That ownership model now spans nine offices: Norfolk, Blacksburg, Richmond, Raleigh, Baltimore, Clemson, Sarasota, Grand Rapids and Chicago. The firm’s team directory lists more than 150 individual staff profiles, spanning architects, interior designers, campus planners and a design-strategy practice that applies UX and AI-informed analysis to campus and building planning.

Higher education and student life work run through much of that roster. Staff profiles named on the firm’s own site describe work on the University of Chicago’s residential house system, Princeton’s Hobson College and other residential colleges, Rice University’s McMurtry and Duncan Residential Colleges, and Colorado College’s East Campus Housing, a project housing 154 students across four buildings. Individual principals also hold parallel teaching posts — one architect in the Clemson office teaches design studios in Clemson University’s School of Architecture and is a founding fellow of its Wood Utilization + Design Institute, applying that research to mass-timber projects for Hanbury clients.

The firm runs its own annual programs, including a summer scholars initiative and a research fellowship, as part of what it calls a culture of curiosity built into the practice alongside client work. It also frames its process explicitly as something other than a fixed deliverable: the firm’s about page states plainly, “We don’t sell a product — we offer a process,” pointing to research and iteration as the through-line across its architecture, planning, preservation, interiors and lab-planning work.

The civic and community side of the practice runs on a similarly cross-disciplinary bench. The firm’s Civic + Community Market Leader, based in the Richmond office, spent three decades leading housing, hospitality and civic projects before joining Hanbury, and now advises the U.S. State Department’s Overseas Building Operations while teaching at NYCCT, NYIT and Virginia Tech. On the interiors side, staff bios describe a research-driven approach to healthy materials specification, with one interior designer’s work recognized nationally through Metropolis magazine’s Future 100 list for emerging design talent.