OZ has completed work all across the country in myriad sectors. Its portfolio includes architecture projects for schools, mixed-use developments, retail, housing, office and vacation resorts.

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As one of the nation’s leading architecture and interior design firms, OZ Architecture can take a big-picture view of its projects. The firm has completed work all across the country in myriad sectors. Schools, mixed-use,  retail, housing, office and vacation resorts are all in OZ’s portfolio.

With so much varied experience, OZ can see possibilities and make connections that other firms would not be able to, according to Associate Principal Elaine Jensen. “Because we have that vast array of experience, that knowledge translates in some pretty interesting ways from one project to another,” she says. The firm has successfully drawn from its experiences in resort design to influence its work in surprising areas – namely, projects such as hospitals and senior housing.

Client-Driven
The firm’s eclectic influences have a lot of room to mingle, because OZ doesn’t believe in returning to the same stock looks. Clients drive the design process and work with OZ as true partners. “I think we’re really collaborative,” Jensen says. “In everything that we do, there is no such thing as an OZ style. We really believe it is our job to listen to the clients.”

OZ also listens to the sounds of change throughout the country, as the clamor for environmentally conscious buildings grows louder. Sustainable and green projects have become a much larger focus for OZ over the last few years, and the firm has adopted sustainability not only as a design element, but as a way of life and of doing business.     

The firm has 31 LEED-accredited architects and design specialists on staff, and also incorporates a number of environmentally friendly policies and processes in its everyday activities.

Mingling Influences
Since its founding in 1964, OZ Architecture has offered both architectural and interior design services to clients. The entire time, the firm has used elements of one to inform the other. “With our architectural experience, we get into a lot of technical detailing issues [in interiors],” says Principal Jim Bershof. Understanding the ins and outs of both areas of design, he says, results in interiors that are “crisper and relate better to the architecture.”

Experience gained from some projects often influences unrelated work in some surprising ways, Jensen says. For example, the firm’s work in designing resorts came into play while it worked on Boulder Community Hospital. Jensen says the clients were looking to maximize calming influences for patients who may be going through an otherwise-difficult time. “They wanted something that felt less like a hospital and more like they were in an elegant, resort-type setting,” she says.

Bershof says this was expressed mostly through the same types of materials and color patterns used in many of the firm’s resort projects. The only difference, he notes, was that the materials had to be more durable for use in a hospital setting.

Principal Paul Trementozzi says the organization of the hospital’s space also borrowed from a resort-type setting. The flow of the space was meant to create a calming sensation not unlike the lobby of a vacation resort. “It has a lot to do with the first experience of walking into the building and that first sequence of the lobby and spaces,” he says. “Other parts of it have to do with very early space planning.”

In the Boulder Community Hospital project, OZ grouped public areas together to create more of a hospitality environment, Trementozzi adds.

The firm has also begun incorporating lessons learned from the blending of resort and hospital elements into other sectors. “We’re finding similar cross-fertilization with the resort and the senior living projects that we’re doing right now,” Trementozzi says.

Jensen says this hybrid approach to architecture and interior design is beginning to catch on in commercial projects. “A lot of the urban mixed-use is becoming more like lifestyle centers,” she says. “It’s all about the complete experience. I think people are looking more for something that’s a respite from their office life.”