Rogers Firm Expands to Reach New ?Hights?

Hight-Jackson Associates PA is widening its focus after almost 50 years of cutting edge design.
The Rogers-based architectural firm will continue crafting the hippest high school and church facilities around while adding more commercial projects such as office, hospitality, financial, residential and even interior design.
DaySpring Card’s corporate headquarters in Siloam Springs was recently completed and serves as the first Hight-Jackson project to break the church-school mode. Outside the original focus that includes new high schools in Bentonville and Rogers, the firm expects to handle at least half a dozen projects ranging in value from $2 million to $60 million within the next two years.
A major reason behind Hight-Jackson’s spreading out is due to Larry Perkin joining the firm as a principal architect. He most recently was president of a mid-sized construction company in Kansas, but has designed projects all over the U.S. and even dabbled in places like Singapore and Jamaica.
Perkin said his construction background helps Hight-Jackson smooth relations with general contractors while his worldwide experience in architecture is opening the firm’s mind.
“Our emphasis is always going to be on client relationships, quality and service. Those things will not change,” Perkin said. “We are continuing to grow our church and school business, but we are growing into other markets and reaching out farther to other places as we go.”
The gradual growth, as Perkin described it, is made easier by a team of designers and principals who have been doing quality work in Northwest Arkansas since 1974. About 80 percent of the firm’s clients are from repeat business and referrals.
Hight-Jackson doesn’t plan to grow too fast, since peaks and valleys in hiring and firing are associated with trying to meet an entire market’s demand at once.
As soon as a boom has slowed, then there’s a bunch of bored employees with nothing to do and principals with shrinking budgets, Perkin said. By growing slowly, such as recently adding three people to its interior design division, Hight-Jackson expects to be doing business another 50 years.
It was originally founded in 1960 as Charles W. Hight and Associates in Coffeyville, Kan. There are now 25 employees at the Rogers office, with plans to bring that number to 30 in the near future.
“We’re careful in hiring because we invest a lot in our employees,” Perkin said. “It’s not our goal to be bigger necessarily, just better.”
Perkin said his decision to come to Northwest Arkansas was because it offered a chance to return “home.” The Fayetteville High alum earned his bachelor’s of architecture degree from the University of Arkansas in 1979. The foundation for his desire to design buildings was cemented as a kid studying the work of his great grandfather, Joseph Perkin, an architect in England around the turn of the century.
“I love every aspect of it,” Perkin said. “There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.”