Shepley Bulfinch

Shepley Bulfinch is a Boston architecture and design firm with roots in 1874, when Henry Hobson Richardson opened his practice after winning the Trinity Church commission. It’s been a women-led business for 18 years and works from studios in Boston, Durham, Hartford, Houston and Phoenix. Healthcare and higher education fill most of the portfolio, with libraries, student housing, master planning and interiors alongside. The firm says it’s designed about four million square feet of pediatric space, and that’s why Intermountain Health picked it, with Gensler, for the Felicia and Ben Horowitz Children’s Hospital in Las Vegas. Construction on the eight-story, 828,600-square-foot hospital is now under way with PENTA and Jacobsen Construction. Pediatrics is the specialty that won it the job.

The practice dates its first project to 1912, when it broke ground with Boston Children’s Hospital. More than a century later healthcare is still a core market, sitting alongside education, housing and libraries in a portfolio the firm describes as spanning over 150 years.

Services are organised as practices rather than a single architecture offering: academic planning, architecture, healthcare master planning, interior design, planning, and a design strategy practice the firm calls Design Strategy by Lens. For institutional clients, the planning work often arrives years ahead of any building.

Two recent projects give a sense of current work. Lehigh University’s Clayton University Center was honoured with a 2026 American Architecture Award in the Restoration and Renovation category, a reminder that much campus work now involves reworking existing buildings rather than new construction. Triangle 54, in the heart of Research Triangle Park, is a campus for science and technology companies. A new residential village at a small men’s college in Indiana was designed to reshape student life and position the school for an expected rise in enrolment.

On sustainability the firm takes two public positions worth noting when assembling a project team: it is a corporate member of the U.S. Green Building Council and a signatory to the AIA 2030 Challenge, which commits signatory firms to reporting and reducing operational carbon across their portfolios.

The firm also describes itself as a woman-led business enterprise and has been listed among the Top 100 Women-Led Businesses and Nonprofits in Massachusetts.

Its stated beliefs put people before form: that all people deserve places connecting them to nature, history and culture, and that design should advance social equity and opportunity. Enquiries go through the Boston office on 617-423-1700.