From unit layouts to the texture of entire city skylines, residential design demands an architecture that is simultaneously personal and urban. In this episode of KPF’s Roundtable video series, Principals Trent Tesch and Rebecca Gromet join Directors Reilly Hogan and Pamela Wackett for a wide-ranging conversation exploring the firm’s approach and philosophy toward multi-family, urban residential design.

Over the course of the conversation, the four discuss how designing from the inside out—prioritizing the unit above all else—shapes every decision from massing to façade, how residential architecture is often what gives cities their texture and human scale, the role of residential fenestration in defining a city’s visual identity, and how culture and local context fundamentally shift the design brief from project to project.

Launched as part of KPF50—the firm’s year-long celebration of five decades of design excellence—the Roundtable series brings together firm leaders and professional associates for conversations that explore the evolving challenges and opportunities pertinent to a designated sector of KPF’s practice.

From left to right:

Rebecca Gromet: With over 15 years leading KPF’s residential planning practice, Rebecca has shaped some of the firm’s most celebrated housing projects across the United States. Her work is defined by a rigorous attention to unit planning and the layered relationship between interior life and urban context, with notable projects including 500 West 21st Street on the High Line, Waldorf Astoria Deer Valley Resort and Residences in Park City, and Houston’s Auberge Houston Hotel and Residences (The Birdsall). Rebecca has served as a part-time faculty member at Parsons School of Design, a guest critic at Columbia University’s GSAPP, and a lecturer at Yale School of Architecture.

Trent Tesch: Over a span of two decades at KPF, Trent has built a residential portfolio spanning some of the city’s most architecturally distinct neighborhoods. His work is grounded in a deep commitment to unit planning as a driver of form, with a particular sensitivity to historic context and urban scale, across projects including One Jackson Square in Greenwich Village, Heron in Tampa, and The Residences at Mandarin Oriental, Miami. An active member of the AIA and the Urban Land Institute, Trent contributes to the industry through mentorship, thought leadership, and participation in design panels.

Reilly Hogan: Reilly has dedicated his career to residential and mixed-use projects in the United States and around the world, developing a unit-first design philosophy across KPF’s most recognizable residential work. His projects include 64 University Place in Greenwich Village, 520 Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, and Fulton Bond in Chicago’s Fulton Market. A licensed architect in New York and member of the AIA, Reilly has taught at Cornell University and served as a juror at Pratt, Yale, and Syracuse University.

Pamela Wackett: Based in KPF’s London office, Pamela brings over two decades of experience to residential design across Europe, South America, and Asia, with particular expertise in historically sensitive urban contexts. Her portfolio includes The Clearings in Chelsea, The Lucan in Kensington and Chelsea, and Granger Bay in Cape Town, each demonstrating an acute sensitivity to historic landscapes and community. A Registered Architect in Chile and fluent in English and Spanish, Pamela shares her expertise on high-end residential and assisted living through KPF’s Residential Architecture Group and supports emerging talent through the firm’s Mentoring Committee.

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Rebecca Gromet: I’m so excited to talk to three of my favorite colleagues about one of our favorite subjects: residential typology. Reilly Hogan, Trent Tesch, I’m Rebecca. We’re here in New York, and we’re joined by Pamela in our London office, our great collaborator.

Pamela Wackett: Hi. It’s so nice to be able to join you guys.

Trent Tesch: Residential work is so precious to me because it’s all about people living, about family interaction, the potential of life that happens. When you start to lay out plans, you can visualize those celebrations, those view corridors, and other things that happen in that residential typology. To me, that’s the most fun part.

Reilly Hogan: I just want to share an anecdote. When I was first working on residential, I was on a project with Becca. We were doing 500 West 21st Street, our project on the High Line. When we were really starting to delve into the unit process with the client and the brokers, I remember the client always saying, every unit has to be great.

TT: Every unit has to be perfect.

RH: He just emphasized this over and over, and we weren’t done until we had achieved that. That has stuck with me over the years, and it’s something I bring as a mentality to all of our projects.

RG: Even on that one, what was so fascinating is it was for Sherwood Equities and Jeffrey Katz. He actually didn’t listen to the broker’s advice so much. And his point was: this just has to work. It doesn’t matter about calibrating the exact unit area, which does drive a lot of our work. He drove through the floor plates that each one has to be perfect.

What was fun about that project, as with every one of our projects, there’s a story we bring to it: who is going to buy there, who’s going to rent there, who’s going to live there? And that story for Jeffrey was how do you bring the Upper East Side downtown? So we spent a lot of time on those layouts, keeping some of the formal aspects of an Upper East Side apartment while also making it contemporary.

On the first pass I did with him, he said the foyers are still too big. We need to get them smaller, but we can’t lose them. They still have to be gracious, like the Upper East Side. All those principles: no dead-end rooms, every room has to have multiple ways in and out. In the bedroom, you don’t want doors because it creates the psychology of needing to escape, but what you really want in the bedroom is to stay there. So even the detail of the sequence from how you enter your bedroom and your whole suite received a lot of scrutiny. That was our first project at KPF that fully sold off of floor plans, and this was 15 years ago. Now that’s the standard. So, Pamela, what were some of your interesting points around the rigors of planning?

PW: We have the opportunity to do projects in different countries, some of them really far away, in Cape Town, New Delhi, China. All these cultures are so different, and you start to understand that what is good for one is not necessarily what they want, because everybody lives differently. You bring your ideologies, the things you’ve learned in London as good practice, and then when you start confronting other cultures, you see that the way of living has completely different requirements. You need to find a way to do good architecture while also adapting and giving what is right for that locality.

RG: That made me think about how we work in New York City. Even though New York City has this identity, each neighborhood is so different. And I know you’ve worked in some of the hippest neighborhoods in the city.

TT: Yes, my first residential project was One Jackson Square in Greenwich Village, at the intersection of Chelsea and Meatpacking. Half of it was in the historic district and that was a really interesting challenge because the shape of the site was so unique and distinct. Trying to get a residential building built in a historic district is quite challenging.

It was a fascinating project that allowed us to work with various community groups and try to make a piece of architecture that was both connected to the site but also had something more to add to Jackson Square. It was a goal that we took incredibly seriously as we wanted to make sure the building felt really good on the site.

RH: I live in that neighborhood and I see that building all the time. I feel like it really belongs to the neighborhood. And even though it’s expressed in glass and metal, it beautifully fits into the historic context to this day.

TT: The planning of that project was not necessarily difficult, but because it was on top of the subway, we had a lot of technical challenges. It was also such a narrow site, a single-loaded corridor as opposed to a double-loaded one, which made it a real challenge for us to figure out.

RG: With the façade, as architects, you want to dream, push the envelope, no pun intended, and have as progressive a design as the culture can accept and the client will allow. But with residential, we tend to be a little more tempered. One Jackson Square hit that balance: it took something more progressive, not what you would expect for a traditional residential context, but it ages well, still fits in, and reflects back the character of the neighborhood.

TT: The argument we made was that if you look closely at all the surrounding blocks intersected by a diagonal street, they all created unique pieces of architecture. And so, because of the shape of the site and its position across from a park, we argued it needed to have almost a civic presence. Because of the zoning and the lot line, there was a tall part and a low part, and the softening of that architecture joined those two pieces together. That’s how we made that building fit on the site.

RH: In a bit of a contrast, our 64 University project really embraced the red brick character of the Village and took that brick, crafting it to another level. A fairly simple facade in some ways, but with a lot of depth. And the utilization of the arch gives the building and its interior spaces a domestic feel and a residential quality.

TT: Well, and the setbacks are so nice because they connect to the scale of the surrounding buildings in a very compelling way. And I also think the arches in that project relate to the scale of the human, which is really great to see.

RG: And the scale of the room. It was so integrated into the planning.

RH: Entirely. It was: what is the right series of rooms across the facade? That is what makes the fenestration.

RG: That was one like 500 West 21st Street, where you worked through the planning for a while before even coming to the articulation of what the outside looks like.

RH: Yes. And then we really anchored the exterior rhythm and structure to that inside-out thinking by making the columns the same as the piers, the same as the whole building’s expression. It was all locked in.

RG: You have a project in Florida where the massing came about through the units and the views, so not just the facade following the unit planning, but the massing itself derived from the units.

RH: I like to think of it as a unit-first approach to making great residential architecture. That project is Rybovich Marina in West Palm Beach, a large site with an opportunity for four residential towers. Our commitment to the client was that every unit would have direct waterfront views.

There would be no compromised unit, no second-rate unit in the entire development. That really informed the shapes of the buildings, the orientation of the units and buildings on the site, with three along the waterfront facing out and one on the pier, which has panoramic views of the water in three directions.

TT: It’s interesting that residential typology often creates distinct forms from that inside-out design thinking. Unit planning is the most important thing, and then the relationship to the city, how it opens up to various cores, whether that’s the water or the grandeur of the skyline, and how each loggia has that direct connection to different parts of the city.

RH: If you think inside out and start with the unit first, the project you initially imagined can become something completely different. I think it results in creative and unexpected buildings.

TT: That’s right. And Pamela, The Clearings project we worked on years ago is kind of the inverse of that unit first approach, right? We had to shape the building because of London’s rules about not blocking views from other apartments.

PW: Yes, The Clearings is so interesting because it was one of the first projects where we started using environmental performance testing deeply at the outset. Starting with a large warehouse block, we began adding permeability in a very strategic way, allowing light to reach neighbors while producing the best units possible.

Triple or dual aspect as a minimum. Then how to bring all that light into a super-prime development while setting back the buildings to mitigate any impact on the neighborhood. Because it is all Georgian and within a protected conservation area. The opportunity was to go up and get truly unobstructed views, but in a way that would never create any pinch point affecting the light of the community around it.

That approach allowed us to go to eight stories in a zone where everything around was about six, because we did it in a way that nobody can see how high the building rises and how much value it creates without impacting the neighborhood. That was really well received by the neighbors.

Each terrace also needed to be strategically located to avoid overlooking, so with about 22 terraces running at the perimeter across the buildings, every apartment has its own terrace. When it gets built, it’s going to be very beautiful.

RG: Since Covid, we’ve seen terraces come up on other typologies, but that’s really one of the granular things that distinguish one residential product from another. Our urban context is built with all those layers, and cities have changed so much. There wasn’t always as much living in the city, at least in New York City.

Every culture is different; Paris was the first to have the multiple-dwelling concept in our modern history. Meanwhile, New York had tenement housing. But cities have transformed, not just New York but throughout the US, into places people want to live. And that’s because of the texture of residential projects.

TT: What residential buildings offer the city is that granular scale, that texture. Because it’s often windows that are designed in ways that make an impression both inside and outside. Windows are really the backbone of the city, creating an urban fabric that, when done well, really feels like a joyous occasion as you’re passing by on the street.

And we not only design it for the family, but we really think about the passerby. Bringing that human scale to these projects is so important.

Reilly, for Fulton Bond, we worked really hard on creating that urban scale through the master plan of those blocks. But it was driven by the layout and the plans, which I think are some of the most well-thought-through plans I’ve ever seen.

RH: We really obsessed over the units. It’s a fairly simple tower of three units, but we spent a lot of time crafting each unit in isolation. How could we make this the best it could be for this site? That also included the idea of the outdoor loggia, which we’re doing on a lot of our projects.

TT: Corner loggias with views to the city and downtown…

RH: Big loggias that are extensions of the living room, and basically become another living space outside. In the end, we took those units and put them together, and that created the shape of the floor plate. It was derived from the units and the requirements of the core.

RG: I think the articulation that gets developed reflects the values of the city. You can tell a city and what it values by how well it develops its residential architecture. What is most successful for the urban fabric is when that value comes across in the residential work.

RH: Sometimes very simple forms in residential have a lot of power and can be really successful just through the character of the facade. Our project in Fulton Market, Fulton Bond, is a great example.

PW: Probably one of the strongest projects recently where all of these things have come together is Granger Bay on the Cape Town waterfront. It’s a very unique site, facing the ocean, with the harbor behind and the whole backdrop of Table Mountain. There’s no bad facade; all the views are ones everybody wants and they carry very high value.

The challenge of where to place the terraces, how to orientate them, and how to connect with the culture by drawing on the character of a working harbor—it brings together all the elements you need to address in residential design.

RG: You know, Paul Katz, our former president, would say that the hotel module changed so much because of the television, and that the residential unit changed so much because of accessibility. Your bathrooms are huge, your kitchens are huge, and bedrooms and other rooms get smaller compared to how it was traditionally.

It’s the kitchen in particular, and how it’s used, that has become a signifier of culture. I know you, Trent, were working on a project where it was so important to have two kitchens, the servery and the butler’s kitchen.

TT: That’s what’s so interesting about planning, how it evolves over time. The first multifamily dwellings in New York City had kitchens suppressed to the back of the apartment; they were considered the least desirable part. Today they’re considered the jewel of the apartment.

It’s an interesting evolution and I’ve always wondered: will kitchens ever recede as we go forward? Will they ever change and evolve into something else? Pamela, you were involved in a project with a unique kitchen design…

PW: The Lucan is a project within a very particular area of Chelsea where we were maximizing unit sizes as much as possible. The client had a very unique idea of this being a second or even third apartment for the buyer. The expected demographic and profile was people who would have a beautiful kitchen but not spend much time in it, so it had to be an open, social kitchen.

Bathrooms needed to be large and super comfortable. Bedrooms needed to be the right size for kids coming with a friend, enjoying holidays, but for people who probably won’t be there long. The kitchen became part of one integrated social space, a very modern concept where everything happens in a single area where most people will likely be ordering takeaway.

RG: We have a project going up now. There is a lot of excitement around the demolition of an existing building there…

TT: The Mandarin Miami. We’ve been working on that for several years, and very soon they’ll start construction. The narrative of that project is all about nature, view, water, Miami, and the historic quality of making something extraordinary in such a unique place, this island. We talked about that building as an island on the island: two separate buildings, hotel and residence, a very large and crafted amenity deck with several pools and a lot of indoor-outdoor space, and then the main tower with panoramic views of the water and downtown Miami. It’s been such an incredible effort for our team here at KPF.

RG: All of our projects add value somehow. For the developer, we need to be adding value with every detail. On that one, it was everywhere—we made decisions that might have been more expensive but added so much more value. For example, how the elevator sequence worked; there was some inefficiency in construction and structure, but what you got was direct entry for every unit.

RH: You see that a lot in our Miami studies, this valuing of that very private, luxury experience of coming off the elevator directly into your unit. Sometimes it can be more efficient than you’d think, because you’re actually selling the elevator vestibule to the tenant. So you have a larger core, but you offset it with the area you’re selling.

RG: Reilly, which one of your designs would you want to live in?

RH: That’s a really hard question. I think the units in Fulton Bond are going to be really spectacular, the three-bedroom typical unit. The spaces flow so nicely, and the windows with the careful fenestration…

TT: And the amenity deck.

RH: Top three for me. Yeah.

TT: I’d probably say the same. The penthouse unit is fantastic, with a large terrace and amazing views to the West Loop and downtown core.

RG: Pamela, what’s your favorite KPF residential building you’d want to live in?

PW: The one I’m doing now.

RG: Tell us about it.

PW: I can’t say much about the one I’m doing now, it’s very confidential. But it’s very interesting because it has a requirement to preserve historic fabric that accounts for almost 65% of the permitted area to develop. That makes it such a challenge, but so interesting, because you have character and you can play with it. I’m really enjoying that project at the moment.

TT: What about you, Rebecca? Where would you live?

RG: I know the exact unit: off the A line at 500 West 21st Street. It has ins and outs, three-side exposure, and a layout you could use in so many different ways. One room could be a library, one bedroom could open up as a family room. It’s a three-bedroom, so you can use it differently depending on your needs. All the bedrooms face a different wall, but they share a vestibule, so when you’re circulating you have a residential wing, and when you’re in it, you’re in your private area. And it has something we can’t do anymore: a wood-burning fireplace. It’s right on the High Line. It’s a great neighborhood.

But my favorite is probably in Houston, The Birdsall. The idea was to bring people who only live in private residences into a multiple-dwelling experience for the first time. So, it’s a very luxurious product. The layouts were a little different from typical urban layouts: a very large primary suite, even bigger than the living suite where you have the living, dining, and kitchen, plus a couple of smaller living spaces. So you could have an office that opened up into a family area off the kitchen, with an eat-in kitchen as well, but it’s all an open layout. I think it translated so well from a private residence that it’s like having your own villa in the sky.

TT: It’s nice in these apartments to find little nooks and crannies that allow you to be together but also have your own space. That’s something really remarkable about some of our projects.

RG: Thank you all for taking time out of your busy schedules to get together. It’s great to collaborate, and it’s really fun to just share stories. I look forward to many more collaborations.

TT: I hope so.

RH: Thanks, Rebecca.

PW: Thank you so much.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. The full conversation can be found in the above linked YouTube video.