Kraemer Design Group

Kraemer Design Group is a Detroit architecture and historic preservation practice headquartered at 1420 Broadway Street, with offices in Toledo, Ohio and Charleston, South Carolina. The firm specialises in historic tax credit work, adaptive reuse, code and accessibility consulting, and interior design, and it has been central to a decade of downtown Detroit building restorations. KDG was historic preservation architect on the $313 million Book Tower restoration, the seven-year revival of Louis Kamper’s 1926 tower that reopened in June 2023 with 229 apartments, a 117-key hotel and more than 2,400 windows refabricated to period profiles. The firm handled the historic tax credit compliance alongside the design work.

Beyond Book Tower, the Detroit portfolio reads like a list of buildings that nearly did not make it: Red Arrow Lofts, Piquette Flats, The Eddystone, Dreamtroit at 1331 Holden and the Overmyer Building, plus a guestroom renovation at the Detroit Athletic Club and a neighborhood survey in Kalamazoo’s Edison district. On several of those jobs KDG held four roles at once — architect, interior designer, historic consultant and procurement agent.

That stacking is deliberate. The firm sells four service lines separately: architecture, interior design, historic consulting and procurement. The procurement group buys hospitality and contract furnishings nationwide, which is how KDG ends up on hotel projects that already have an architect. The historic consulting group works the same way, providing technical resources to other architecture practices rather than only supporting in-house designs.

A staff historian researches each building’s full story before design starts, and the same team steers historic tax credit applications through National Park Service review. The firm claims more completed historic renovations in Detroit’s urban core than any other practice.

Leadership is local: Michigan natives Maureen Kraemer, Robert Kraemer and Brian Rebain. They market the studio’s method under a coined term, Outovation, which KDG describes as balancing creative thinking against technical know-how on old and new buildings alike.

Geographically the practice has pushed out from Detroit through the Great Lakes region and into the southeastern United States, with a Charleston, South Carolina office and a Northwestern Mutual project there. Licensure is active in dozens of states, with credentials to be licensed in all fifty.

Recognition includes Top Design Firms listings from Hotel Management Magazine in 2011 and 2014, a Top Purchasing Companies listing in 2012, a Crain’s Detroit Business 40 Under 40 for Bob Kraemer, and a Grand Prize in Durkan’s D*SCOVER hospitality carpet design competition.

Headquarters is 1420 Broadway Street, Detroit, MI 48226, on (313) 965-3399 or hello@thekraemeredge.com.