New leadership is ahead for Ankrom Moisan’s interior design group.

Karen Bowery is retiring from her position as executive vice president and director of interiors on Tuesday – leaving a 45-year career-legacy.

Bowery was the first interior designer at Ankrom Moisan when the firm was founded in 1983. Now, the firm’s interior group has grown to 72 people who work across three offices and seven market sectors, including market-rate housing, which Ankrom Interior has coined “urban living,” senior housing, higher education, affordable housing, health care, office and workplace, and retail.

Ankrom Moisan’s Interiors group leadership will be turned over to Alissa Brandt, vice president of interiors, and Leah Wheary Brown, vice president for interior design strategy – bringing the firm’s executive leadership team to 60 percent women.

“Over that span of 40 years,” Brandt said, “I think it’s fair to say that Karen has worked tirelessly, tirelessly to empower women in this industry and (for) designers to have a solid and respectable seat at the table with architects, with our clients (and) with construction teams.”

While at Ankrom Moisan, Bowery launched a hospitality-driven interior design company called The Society in 2016, which works primarily with hoteliers. Casey Scalf, a design principal and founding member, will become the director of The Society when Bowery retires.

Under her leadership at both Ankrom Moisan and The Society, Bowery and her teams have received numerous awards from the American Institute of Architecture and the International Interior Design Association Oregon and Pacific Northwest chapters, along with Gold Key Awards for Excellence in Hospitality Design, 91��Ƶ Oregon TopProjects Awards and more.

When Bowery started at Ankrom Moisan, interior design was still a relatively new discipline. The Foundation for Interior Design Educational Research and National Council for Interior Design Qualification had only recently been formed to establish, maintain and govern standards for the education and examination of interior design professionals.

In the 1970s, only a few accredited schools offered it as a program. Bowery said she counts herself lucky to attend one of them. When she graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1978, Bowery was only one of 10 in her program.

“There was no road map. There was no ability to figure out how to create and envision an interior design firm or an interior design discipline,” Bowery said.

She added that back then and for many years after, people would think of interior design as interior decorating, which Bowery said she set out to put aside and squash. Today, however, more than 3,000 interior design programs are offered at colleges and universities in the U.S., .

Bowery said curiosity, nimbleness and innovativeness have been key characteristics of Ankrom Moisan’s interior group’s success. These particularly came into play in the condo days of the Pearl District when the neighborhood was first being transformed from railroads to skyrises.

Ankrom Moisan was tapped to design 10 to 12 of the new buildings, a spokesperson stated.

“In so doing … we recognized a gap,” Bowery said.

The developers needed to presale the condominiums, and the contractors needed the end cost. Between them was an opportunity to increase the sale of the units by offering customizations.

Ankrom Moisan hired a software developer to create an online package listing the unit and all the upgrades a buyer could make, from a high-end applicant package to individual customizations – all already priced by the contractor. A designer from the firm then went and met with every owner when selecting their customizations.

It was great, Bowery said. The condo owners felt they had a designer’s opinion. Any customization selected was marked in the software, which then fed straight into a sales agreement the contractor could use to build.

While not prevalent then, unit customization is standard practice with condominium design by today’s metrics.

Through the years, Ankrom Moisan’s interior group continued to innovate with projects like Aegis Living Lake Union, the first assisted living community built to meet the Living Building Challenge Petal Certification through International Living Future Institute (ILFI), a highly rigorous green building standard.

Wheary Brown said that sustainability and a more holistic approach to wellness that includes mind and body have also been major talking points in interior design. It is more than just providing a physical fitness option but having spaces that might meet a person’s desire to have a calming retreat or an outdoor space to work or be social.

“It’s no longer just status quo to have a fitness gym and check it off the box,” she added.

Bowery said there’s a cost-benefit to developers for taking a more sustainable or holistic wellness approach to their buildings. Renters are looking for differentiation and authenticity. If a renter opts to stay in the building for 18 months to two years versus the average of 11 months, she added, that’s sustainable in a more monetary way.

The interior group’s success partly has been due to its work outside the firm – about 60 to 70 percent, Brandt estimated. With specific markets like market rate, 80 percent of the work is with outside firms. The only market sector that’s all internal is senior housing.

“Being able to fill the gaps and innovate and being the best is, I think, the hardest success,” Bowery said.

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The pipeline of health care projects is beginning to slow as hospitals experience dramatically reduced revenues, industry officials said Tuesday.

Hospitals have seen significant drops in revenue-producing elective procedures, leading many health care groups to put building projects on hold, an architect and construction manager who work in health care said.

“Several of our clients have had to just put capital projects on hold because they’re faced with extreme downturns in revenue,” said Larry Parrett, a principal at NBBJ‘s Portland office.

Health care groups also face higher costs related to retrofitting existing facilities and providing personal protective equipment, he added. “We have seen quite a few our projects put on hold, particularly if they’re in the design phase,” Parrett said.

The comments came during a Builder Breakfast event held virtually Tuesday by the Daily Journal of Commerce. The discussion panel also included Trent Rehfeldt, health care market executive for Mortenson’s Portland office, and Doug Nelson, PeaceHealth’s system vice president for planning and development.

Some health care projects are still moving forward. Parrett said NBBJ continues to respond to requests for proposals for new patient towers, ambulatory care centers and medical office buildings. Urban “micro-clinics” are increasingly popular, as are in-office health care clinics at major corporate campuses such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Mortenson Construction is pricing subcontractors for a wellness center at Reed’s Crossing, the South Hillsboro mega-development. Mortenson plans to break ground in December, with delivery scheduled 15 months later, in early 2022, Rehfeldt said.

“This project, because of our delivery system, never paused, never stopped, so we’re excited to deliver the Reed’s Crossing project for Hillsboro,” Rehfeldt said.

The wellness center will have two full stories and 108,000 square feet. The project combines a full medical clinic with a fitness facility, including an aquatic center, locker rooms, a childcare center and other amenities.

Mortenson is serving as developer and design-builder with Ankrom Moisan Architecture.

Broadly, the pandemic has led to a number of design changes. PeaceHealth, like other health care groups, is reworking patient rooms, Nelson said.

“We want to transition to single-patient rooms,” he said. “PeaceHealth has a lot of shared patient rooms. We understand that’s not where health care is headed at all.”

Anne Talcott, health care industry group leader at Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt, served as moderator for Tuesday’s event.

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