In 2015, veteran designer Jamie Drake and up-and-comer Caleb Anderson made a somewhat unorthodox arrangement: They would merge their two eponymous independent firms into one, dubbed Drake/Anderson, and, in the process create a long-term succession plan that ultimately transferred full ownership of the business to Anderson. Ten years later, the plan has come to fruition—Anderson is alone at the helm, and the firm has a new name: /And.

Some succession plans are about continuity and the careful preservation of a legacy; this one is about change and evolution, both personal and professional. Back when the deal was struck, Anderson was in his early 30s, and his goals were “very much about being successful, being able to expand and grow.” Over the course of a decade, his ambitions have shifted.

“You achieve a level of success and you’re like, ‘OK, now I’m here. What is this?’ You start to enter a new realm of questioning,” he says. “Now it’s like, ‘How do I have a positive impact in the world?’ That’s a very different landing point than ‘I want to have a big, successful firm, be on lists and get published.’”

At least some of the impact Anderson is hoping to make in the firm’s new incarnation is centered around sustainability. “A couple of years ago, I took a Healthy Materials Lab course at Parsons that really woke me up to the reality of what we’re dealing with in our industry,” he says. He has since hired a consultant to help the firm develop a materials library of its own with sustainability-minded parameters.

The goal, says Anderson, is about making lofty talk about sustainability part of the daily reality of the firm—and eventually the broader industry—rather than an unrealized ideal. “It’s very overwhelming, especially for smaller residential firms, to comprehensively incorporate [sustainability] standards,” he says. “We’re still developing [our approach], but for example, [we require that a certain] percentage of our specs come from within a certain mile radius of the project. We have a transparency agreement with collaborators. We have a vetting process with any materials coming into our firm—Phillip Jeffries actually created a new vinyl ground for their wallcoverings based on what we were letting them know was acceptable for our firm.”

Anderson sees that kind of change at the vendor level as a stepping stone toward bigger shifts. “I know our firm’s immediate impact is not [always going to be] huge,” he adds. “But it’s leading the way and trying to have thought leadership, particularly in the luxury residential space.”

The notion of connecting design to a greater purpose is territory Anderson has explored before. In 2022, he and his partner, DeAndre DeVane, launched Well-Designed, a networking and event series intended to bring wellness resources to designers and architects. Well-Designed has since been restructured (new events are in the works for 2025), but the concept of doing more than just pretty rooms is behind many of the changes Anderson has made and hopes to keep making—down to the firm’s apt new name, /And.

“I really want to move away from personality-based design. It’s not where I am anymore, and I wanted to acknowledge the collaborative effort of the work that we do,” says Anderson. “The other reason for [the name change] was that there are all these adjectives that we’ve used to describe our work in the past: glamorous, luxurious, sophisticated. We’re still those things, but now we’re also this, this and this. That’s speaking to the evolution of not only where I see our firm going, but where I hope that our industry goes. How do we do great design and be all of these [other] things too? That, to me, is the creative opportunity for this moment.”

Of course, all of these shifts began percolating while Anderson was still in a formal partnership with Drake. In the early days of the Drake/Anderson journey, much of the press was centered around their collaboration and the charming yin-yang of the gregarious, outgoing Drake and the thoughtful, reserved Anderson. However, in the final years of the arrangement, Anderson says he and Drake had drifted into their own lanes.

“Jamie’s DNA is inevitably in what we do,” he says. “[But] in recent years, [he] and I, for the most part, have not worked on the same projects. We have a different process.” As for navigating the complex dynamic of a long-simmering succession plan, Anderson has treated the relationship “with integrity and respect.”

Drake, for his part, recently announced a relaunch of Drake Design Associates. A release announcing the news describes a roster of current projects—including an oceanfront estate in East Hampton and a modern mountain retreat at Utah’s Deer Valley Resort—as well as a “return to [Drake’s] roots with renewed focus on his signature approach.”

“I have always embraced change with excitement and vigor, and now I get to embrace it again,” Drake tells BOH. “Years ago, I said, ‘I must constantly evolve.’ I hate stagnation; I like to have evolution in life. It became clear that both Caleb and I had grown, and it was time to follow our separate paths. I couldn’t be more excited for our next chapters.”

Though Anderson remains the same reflective designer he was when Drake/Anderson was formed, he’s embracing the reality that, as the sole principal of the firm, his profile will change. “I’m excited to be able to start putting a vision out there and letting it take shape,” he says. “I’m excited to feel a sense of freedom—to be seen in ways that maybe I haven’t been seen before.”