PLBA Has Become a Global Firm

What is today Northwest Arkansas’ largest architectural firm was once all of two partners and a secretary who came very close to making western Oklahoma their land of opportunity.

A sudden twist of fate brought Perry L. Butcher & Associates to Rogers, and 39 years later the company still calls Northwest Arkansas home. However, its work can be found from Hawaii to Alaska and Puerto Rico to The People’s Republic of China.

Butcher said his goal back in 1963 was simply to have an office and to be able to practice architecture. With about 180 employees today, he wonders how long his current office will hold the growth his company continues to experience.

The firm recently added civil and mechanical/electrical engineering divisions, a move Butcher believes will make his company even more attractive. The additions allow the firm to handle almost everything in large-scale development, including laying out street plans, water and sewer, grading, etc.

“We always had a lot of other companies working for us on the mechanical and electrical side,” Butcher said. “Adding them will allow us to better serve our clients and coordinate our clients. Also, it gives us good control having everything in-house. We now have a group of people who do nothing but check on the quality of the drawings. This just gives us a more complete package.”

A close relationship with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. over the years helped propel Butcher & Associates to the top-shelf status it holds today. It has not gone unnoticed outside the area’s borders either, as Lowe’s Companies Inc., McDonald’s Corp. and Kinko’s Inc. are just a few of the national chains using the firm’s services.

Good Place to Start

Butcher was originally from the western Oklahoma town of Woodward. After graduating from Oklahoma State University’s School of Architecture with a bachelor’s degree in architectural design in 1959, he began an apprenticeship in Little Rock.

Paul Wilbur also attended OSU and was working out of Rogers for a Little Rock firm. The two men wanted to open shop together and had a town picked out in Oklahoma. But just before they were ready to move back to their home state, a large architectural firm out of Oklahoma City opened an office in the town they had selected.

“We thought trying to go out there and compete against a firm that size would not be good business sense,” Butcher said.

So, in June of 1963, Butcher and Wilbur decided to begin their business in Rogers.

“We felt this place would be prosperous,” Butcher recalled. “The future looked promising with [Beaver Lake] going in. Also, although there wasn’t much architectural work here, there weren’t many architects either. There seemed like a lot of opportunities.

“We felt like getting out of the big city gave us a chance to do some nice projects. We looked around at the surrounding states and the architects per number of people. There were about twice as many people in this state without an architect — one for every 13,000 — as there were in Oklahoma, which had one architect for about every 7,000 people. The one thing we didn’t factor in is that there was also more money in Oklahoma at that time.”

Butcher said early work in Northwest Arkansas wasn’t very profitable. School budgets were very small. Most commercial real estate was selling for under $10 per SF.

“We cut our teeth on projects with very low budgets,” Butcher said. “But I think we did a good job with our clients and served their needs. There was not a lot of wasted area, and we did everything within their budgets.”

Wilbur left the business in 1972.

The office’s proximity would pay even greater dividends when Wal-Mart began expanding to towns all over the country.

“We came on-line with [Wal-Mart] doing some small projects in the early ’70s,” Butcher said. “We did some of their first drawings. Then we began doing store additions in the late ’70s. Our association grew, and we began doing more work for them. By the late ’80s, we were doing a very substantial amount of work for them.”

Butcher would not disclose what percentage of his firm’s work is dedicated to Wal-Mart, but he did call the Bentonville company “a major client.” He said retail businesses like Wal-Mart and Lowe’s make up about 85 percent of the firm’s business.

Other national chains that often use Butcher & Associates include Best Inns of America and Newlyweds Foods Inc.

Prairie Creek to Shanghai

Butcher & Associates does a limited number of residential projects. But one of the homes the firm worked on is a landmark design in Arkansas.

The Greystone home in Prairie Creek, built by Volkswagen dealership mogul Willard Robertson in 1970, was a major project for the firm.

The home, recently purchased by John Brown University’s Soderquist Center for Leadership and Ethics, includes a large, two-story main house with a basement, cellar, guest house, gardener’s apartment and tunnel connecting some of the buildings.

While Greystone is just down the road from the Rogers headquarters of Butcher & Associates, the firm also has projects on the other side of the planet.

One of the firm’s most notable projects is an 18-story music conservatory in China. It has five auditoriums for classrooms and concerts.

Also, in Shanghai the firm worked on an 18-story apartment complex where the bottom three stories are commercial. In Beijing, the firm designed a 29-story office building and smaller project for Newlyweds Foods. And it worked on an office/apartment high-rise in Chung-ching.

Locally, the firm designed the University of the Ozarks’ communications building in Clarksville, remodeled the Rogers Little Theater, worked on the Arts Center of Ozarks in Springdale and was associated with work on Baum Stadium and the Broyles Complex at the University of Arkansas.

Butcher points to Gravette Medical Center as one of the firm’s signature designs.

Built in 1972, the 115-bed facility with fully equipped hospital services is a steel frame, masonry-clad structure that was bid at about three percent below budget. It’s featured on the firm’s Web site — www.plba.com — the hospitals many complex systems, including electrical, mechanical, fire protection, codes, ICU, CCU, emergency treatment, laboratories and surgery suites.

“I think we did an extremely good job there,” Butcher said.

“We found in looking at other hospitals that there were good laboratories, good X-ray areas and good ER areas. But they didn’t relate to each other very well. I think we did a real good job of visiting with the doctors and nurses and seeing what their needs were. We didn’t want it to be a hospital just like everybody else’s hospital. We wanted it to be their hospital.”

Butcher & Associates is licensed in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. It is also associated with an architect in the Bahamas.

The projects in China are led by a firm’s architect stationed in Irvine, Calif., where Butcher said it makes for easier travel back and forth to Asia.

There are also Butcher & Associates personnel based in Arlington, Texas, and Windsor, Conn.

Butcher said he hopes the addition of the civil and mechanical/electrical divisions will help the firm capture more of the local market while also adding to its national client base.

The firm’s partners are Perry Butcher, his son Steve, John Mack and Doug Hurley, the most recent addition.

“I would put my firm against any firm from New York to California, Boston or Philadelphia as far as our work,” Butcher said.

SUMMARY:

From small beginnings, Perry L. Butcher & Associates has spread its talents all around the world.