When a millworker left them in the lurch at the last minute, designers Lathem Gordon and Cate Dunning leaned hard on their industry partners.

It was a bad time for Gordon Dunning’s director of operations to be out of the office. Just 24 hours earlier, the Atlanta firm’s principals, Lathem Gordon and Cate Dunning, had overseen the demolition of a client’s kitchen. The team was ready to coordinate the installation of new cabinets, which had been ordered four and a half months earlier and confirmed and reconfirmed with the vendor. But on the scheduled day, the cabinets never appeared. In fact, the work hadn’t started, the vendor now admitted, and would take another six to eight weeks.

Lathem Gordon and Cate DunningMali Azima