For Tom Sprinkle and Brendan Dunnigan, architecture has never been only about the finished building. It is about the years before the ribbon is cut, the difficult conversations, the pressure points, the client's risk, the consultant team's choreography, and the thousands of decisions that determine whether a project merely gets built or becomes something that feels inevitable in its setting.
That conviction sits at the center of the firm they launched after decades at HKS, one of the most recognized architecture practices in the world. Their departure was not a rejection of scale, nor a critique of the institution where they built much of their professional reputation. It was a deliberate return to the part of the work that first drew them into architecture: direct client relationships, hands-on design leadership, and the chance to shape a project from its earliest idea through the long, exacting path toward completion.
A Boutique Practice With Big-Firm Experience
Sprinkle and Dunnigan understood the value of large-scale practice. They had worked on significant hospitality, residential, and mixed-use projects. They knew the demands of luxury hotel design, the discipline required to coordinate complex consultant teams, and the level of polish expected by owners and operators.
Yet they also knew what can happen inside a large machine. Senior leaders often become the people who win the work, set the early tone, and then move on. The daily craft of guiding the project, solving the owner's specific problem, and staying close to the design can pass through layers.
Their new practice, Dunnigan Sprinkle was built to close that distance.
The promise is simple but powerful: clients get the experience without the overhead. Not an offshoot of a large firm. Not a miniature version of one. A different model entirely, shaped for owners who want senior-level thinking at the table from the beginning and still there when the hard questions arrive.
Hospitality as a Way of Thinking
Although Sprinkle and Dunnigan are deeply rooted in hospitality architecture, their work is not confined to hotels. Their broader thesis is that hospitality is less a building type than a discipline of experience.
A resort, at its best, knows how to make people feel oriented, welcomed, transported, and connected to place. That same intelligence can inform residential buildings, offices, private clubs, mixed-use destinations, and immersive environments. For Sprinkle, the question is not simply what the project is, but who will inhabit it, what they should feel, and how the architecture expresses the owner's culture and ambitions.
That perspective gives the firm its point of difference. Rather than importing a fashionable aesthetic, Sprinkle and Dunnigan talk about designing from the location outward. Culture, climate, landscape, history, guest psychology, and operational reality all become material. The goal is not architecture that announces itself as clever. It is architecture that feels as if it belongs.
This distinction matters in a hospitality market often pressured by replication. Brand standards, financing constraints, and schedule realities can all flatten a project's identity. Sprinkle and Dunnigan have positioned their firm against that tendency. Their work is aimed at owners who want something more specific than a template, and more personal than a production-line solution.
The Discipline of Staying Small
The hospitality industry is dominated by scale. Large projects often attract large firms, in part because owners assume complexity demands institutional weight. Sprinkle and Dunnigan do not dismiss that logic. For a thousand-key hotel, they will say plainly, there are firms built for that. Their own lane is more selective.
They operate as a boutique hospitality architecture practice with the ability to scale through trusted partners. The firm has no traditional office overhead and has avoided building a large permanent staff simply to sustain growth for growth's sake. Instead, it relies on a flexible network of architects, production teams, contractors, interior designers, engineers, and consultants, many of whom have worked with Sprinkle and Dunnigan for decades.
That model gives them range without dilution. When a project requires more horsepower, they can expand. When the work contracts, they are not forced into the kind of overhead that can push firms toward misaligned projects. In a market where hotel financing remains difficult and timelines are unpredictable, that nimbleness is not incidental. It is strategic.
Their approach also reflects a changing professional culture. The pandemic normalized remote coordination, but Sprinkle and Dunnigan turned that adaptation into an operating philosophy. They have found experienced collaborators who may not want a conventional full-time role, but still want to contribute to serious, high-quality work. In that sense, their firm is not only serving a changing market. It is responding to a changing workforce.
Reputation Before Visibility
For most of its early life, the firm has grown through relationships. Dunnigan estimates that the overwhelming majority of its work has come from referrals: interior designers, contractors, construction managers, former clients, and industry colleagues who know what the pair can deliver.
That is the best kind of validation, but it has limits. Word of mouth is powerful, yet it travels unevenly. Visibility becomes important when the right owner, at the right moment, is beginning to imagine a project and searching for the team that can make it real.
The firm's next chapter is partly about closing that gap. Sprinkle and Dunnigan are not trying to become louder for the sake of attention. They want their visibility to match their experience, particularly as their built portfolio continues to mature. Projects in California, including hospitality work in Healdsburg, project in Moab, Utah and hotel repositioning work nearing completion, are beginning to show what the firm has done under its own name rather than through past affiliations.
That shift matters. A portfolio built over decades earns credibility. A portfolio built independently earns identity.
Growth Without Dilution
Over the next two years, success for Sprinkle and Dunnigan is not defined by headcount alone. Revenue matters, and the firm has seen strong early growth, but the deeper ambition is qualitative: better clients, stronger locations, a more developed built portfolio, and projects where quality is not an aspiration added late but a commitment embedded from the beginning.
Dunnigan describes the ideal client as one with a "flight to quality," someone who understands that luxury cannot be separated from care, detail, and durability. Sprinkle adds another measure of success: being able to show more work that belongs entirely to the firm's present, not only to their impressive past.
Their partnership is part of the story. Sprinkle brings the sensibility of a creative director. Dunnigan brings operational discipline, project leadership, and a comfort with business shaped in part by family experience with entrepreneurship. Together, they have the rare combination that small firms need to survive: creative vision and practical control.
The Long Journey
Architecture, especially hospitality architecture, is a long commitment. A client may live with a project spanning five, seven, even ten years before the full vision is realized. That duration tests the strength of the team as much as the quality of the design.
Sprinkle and Dunnigan want their firm to be known for making that journey clearer, more honest, and more rewarding. No false ease. No theatrical promises. Just a disciplined process, senior attention, and a belief that the best guest experiences begin with the owner's experience of being properly heard.
Their practice is not chasing scale as an identity. It is pursuing authority of a different kind: the authority that comes from staying close to the work, respecting the place, and knowing that in luxury hospitality, the most memorable spaces rarely feel imposed. They feel discovered.
