Interior Design magazine has named its latest list of Rising Giants, the 100 companies trailing the magazine’s Top 100 Giants list of the country’s top-performing design firms. Among the top three are Hartman Design Group, based in Rockville, Maryland, with $8.5 million in design fees; Aria Group Architects, based in Oak Park, Illinois, with $8.475 million in design fees; and Margulies Perruzzi Architects, in Boston, with $7.4 million in design fees.
But the Rising Giant firms, reports the publication, “had seen steady revenue growth for years, ever since the Great Recession faded away, and were forecasting a robust $536 million in design fees, which would have amounted to double the actual total of five surveys before. Not only did that not happen, but we actually saw fees go down for the first time since 2009. Though a very respectable number, $456 million is still off 3 percent from last time, and of course, nowhere near the forecast.” On the whole, however, almost 60 firms reported an average of revenue growth of 17 percent, with 28 firms earning less (16 percent, on average). As the magazine reports, “those numbers are the highest and lowest, respectively, since the pre-recession days of 2007.”
The list is based on a two-part yearly business survey of the second 100 largest firms, as judged by their interior design fees over the year ending December 2015.
