Vision, Mod Digs Bolster Benham

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Lowell’s branch of The Benham Cos. operates in the field like an old-school Southeastern Conference football coach: They’re not afraid to squat down on site and draw something up in the dirt.

Gary Carnahan and Kevin Kuehn, co-managers of the Lowell branch, said the firm’s “hands-on design and vision” are what helped grow its local fee revenue 50 percent from $2 million in 2002 to about $3 million last year. Benham has a dozen local projects ongoing for 2004.

Those include additional work at Lowell’s Monroe Corners commercial development, where the firm’s own modern-design office incorporates dramatic views into 6,000 SF of practical work space.

“The clients who like us best are those who want design work,” Carnahan said. “We like to start with a blank piece of paper, walk onto the property with the owner and help them envision what can be there.”

Aaron Burkes, a partner with Lowell developers Burkes & Burkes Development LLC, said Benham has done three buildings for his firm totaling 48,000 SF. Two more totaling nearly 17,000 SF are in the works.

“What makes it so nice is they can do the project the whole way through,” Burkes said. “The engineering, large-scale development plans, architecture and even the surveying is all lumped in to the same contract.”

Kuehn said Benham looks for unique solutions that others might not discover. By being a multi-disciplined architecture and engineering firm, which in Lowell includes 24 professionals, Kuehn said Benham is able to focus on the master planning of communitywide architecture.

“We’re not going after the big-box jobs,” Kuehn said. “We would do them, but that’s not our focus. We do churches, banks, schools, commercial centers, professional buildings — the buildings that make up the fabric of a community.”

Fifty percent of the Lowell branch’s work is out-of-state, but its key local markets are northwest and central Arkansas. It opened a 10-person Little Rock office in January, and combined with 125 professionals in Tulsa, the firm leverages 158 professionals in the region.

That doesn’t even include another 250 professionals at the Oklahoma City home office where it was founded in 1909. Today, the corporation has grown to become the fourth largest A&E firm in the Southwest with 686 professionals at 12 offices in nine states. According to Engineering News-Record’s 2004 list of the Top 500 Design Firms in the United States, Benham ranked No. 106 with $75.2 million in 2003 revenue.

The firm is in the process of buying itself back from Atkins Inc. of London, England, the end of a four-year process that makes year-over-year sales comparisons immaterial.

Steve Baugher is director of engineering at Cooper Homes Inc., a subsidiary of Cooper Communities Inc. in Rogers. He said the expertise of Benham’s Lowell staff is most evident when it does feasibility study and governmental liaison work for Cooper.

At the national level, Benham is helping privatize housing at 13 military bases nationwide. It’s a 50-year contract that company spokesman Steve Tompkins said is probably worth more than $2 billion. Kuehn is one of three master planners on Benham’s “vision team” for the military project.

Other projects the Lowell Branch is working on include:

• New welcome centers totaling about $10.8 million for the state of Arkansas at Texarkana, Van Buren, El Dorado and Corning.

• Architecture and landscape architecture services for a new $4.8 million, 26,000-SF aerospace vehicle and maintenance facility at the Ebbing Air National Guard base at Fort Smith.

• Overseeing a $300 million lakefront development in Branson anchored by a 220,000-SF convention center, town square and board walk.