As one of the premier national, third-party providers in the Retail Tenant Improvement industry, Rothschild Downes (RD) knows where to find the best talent. As a graduate of Environmental Design with an emphasis in Architecture (ENVD ’89), Principal Owner Mark Meiser believes that the students coming out of the ENVD program are equipped with the skills that help them thrive in his business-minded, full-service design and construction company. From the Denver “Basecamp” office to field offices in all the major markets around the country, Rothschild Downes offers an arsenal of services to clients including in-house design, project management, construction management, and tenant coordination services to the leading developers, owners, and operators of large scale complex mixed-use projects. With the training students receive in school, first-year grads have the design skills to hit the ground running and are immediate assets to the company. Rothschild Downes has hired seven graduates from the ENVD program in the last two years, and their varying skill sets have brought them to every discipline within the company, from Denver office design roles to on-site field roles in project management and tenant coordination.
According to Meiser, it is his company’s ability to provide one-stop retail tenant coordination services that has taken the company to new heights:
“We have doubled the size of the company the past two years and love to marry up young talent with experience and train them up. It is THE RD WAY. It’s a big commitment for us, from a resource-perspective, as a medium-sized firm with principal involvement on all levels. But, with the mindset of Thinking Forward we are going to immediately put these recent graduates front and center with important tasks on billion-dollar development projects or portfolios using their all-around education and passion for the built environment and in particular their computer and design skills in programs including Revit, CAD, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and SketchUp. We see how well they can take direction with their assigned responsibilities and the firm provides the checks & balances to expedite their learning while cranking out great product. Our employees have an immediate impact at the company; we want high energy motivated individuals to shape them as future stewards for our specialized niche in the industry. We are extremely proud of our culture.”
Anthony Jones (ENVD ’17) has worked for RD for nearly two years as a CAD Services Manager and understands how useful his ENVD education was in making an immediate impact at RD:
“The variety of programs that we used in ENVD helped a lot. When you can take a PDF and bring it into Illustrator and make edits, it blows people’s minds. It’s crazy how Illustrator and InDesign are like foreign languages to a lot of people, but in ENVD you use them on every project. For example, we make resumes for all our employees when they are moving to the next project, and we make those in Illustrator sometimes, but without ENVD graduates as employees, this wouldn’t be possible. ENVD teaches you what looks good, as well as composition. You don’t find that in other programs. If you can bring that to a company who before didn’t have that line of thought, it’s a really big contribution to the company.”
Annee Cooper (ENVD ’18) likewise appreciates the skills she learned as an architecture student at CU in preparation for her eventual job at RD as a CAD Services Manager:
“My job is fairly architecture focused, so my architecture emphasis along with Marcel de Lange’s materials class has been very useful. With the Tenant Design Manuals that we create, I have to go through construction drawing sets for each project and extract the necessary information in order to relay design guidelines to the tenants, so learning how to understand construction documents in ENVD has also been very helpful. I have also used my Adobe skills at RD to clean up renderings and other drawings that are used in our Tenant Design Manuals.”
Based on his track record with the Program in Environmental Design, Meiser has a lot of confidence in the alumni he hires and counts on them to represent his company well. From the most recent round of hiring, Meiser has sent three ENVD alumni to join the Hudson Yards Tenant Coordination Team as integral team members on the largest private real estate development project ever attempted in the country – the $26B campus of Hudson Yards in New York City. RD was assigned with the crown jewel of the development over five years ago, the $2B Shops & Restaurants at Hudson Yards, with 80 stores and restaurants successfully delivered at the recent March 15, 2019 Grand Opening. Kurt Gravit (ENVD ’17), one of the three ENVD graduates who were on site this past year in New York, said that the scale of the project is larger than anything he ever imagined he would be involved with as a professional, especially in his first post-grad job. Regarding his duties at Hudson Yards, Gravit says:
“I work in the Retail Podium which is part of the Hudson Yards campus. There are currently five towers that are under construction and the retail podium is a seven-story shopping center that sits between the two towers along 10th Avenue. I’m basically a project manager here. I work with two construction management companies, I utilize BIM [architectural design software] coordination and manage installation of utilities and provisioning for the tenant spaces; everything involved in preparing the tenant’s units and providing landlord work is what I manage in the field.”
Bradley Miller (ENVD ’18), who works alongside Gravit in New York, is amazed by all the pieces of a construction project he manages in his role as a Retail Tenant Coordinator:
“As a Tenant Coordinator, I am heavily involved in the tenant improvement process which includes coordinating tenant building systems to tie into base building MEP systems. I also provide design, mechanical, electrical and plumbing reviews to ensure that tenant spaces are being constructed correctly and abide by the Hudson Yards Design Criteria which was generated by the RD Basecamp Denver office. I am fully involved in the constructions process from A to Z.”
Chad McOuat (ENVD ’13) began his career at RD in 2013 and has been all over the country with the company, acting as “boots on the ground” for projects in places like New Orleans, San Mateo, and Atlanta. As part of his role in the company, Chad works hand in hand with the Principals of RD to oversee the Tenant drawing Design Review as well as the creation of the Tenant Design Criteria Manuals for most of the projects the company does.
“In Atlanta, I worked on a luxury shopping center called The Shops Buckhead Atlanta. It was already an operating shopping district prior to me taking over, but I managed the build-out of a steakhouse and a few other retail shops. We also picked up Mill Creek Residential as a client, who develop large mixed-use apartment complexes. There are five different Mill Creek Locations around Atlanta, and I manage the retail portion for them - everything from leasing through construction. I am behind the scenes on everything involving those tenants, whether it’s making sure that all of the design is complementary to the project aesthetic or that their contractors are adhering to our Rules and Regulations."
Back at Basecamp, several ENVD alumni employ their design skills to support these construction projects in New York, Nashville, Atlanta, Houston, San Francisco, Tampa and other projects around the country. Annee Cooper relishes her role in contributing designs for tenant manuals that RD’s clients use. She explains:
“I am currently making a Tenant Design Manual for a project in Gainesville, Florida. The manual lays out the criteria and vision the landlord has for storefront design and is given to the tenant when they sign their lease to move into the retail space. That is what I have been working on for the past couple of months. Prior to that, I was doing more CAD work, lease plans and lease outline drawings for all of our projects, both of which lay out the lease line of the space which shows the rentable square footage that the tenant has to work with. The project we just started is a similar Tenant Criteria Manual for a shopping center in Honolulu, Hawaii!”
Caresa Atencio (ENVD ’18) describes her position at RD as the perfect setting to experience unique design opportunities and acquire new skills, but also to use what she learned at CU:
“I work alongside our in-house architect, Sera. I’ve assisted mainly with white box tenant improvement work for Hudson Yards. This includes some preliminary CAD work, construction document review, signage shop drawing review, etc. In the beginning, I was able to assist with some interior design work by creating a library of finishes for tenants to choose from which included flooring options, wall finishes, and lighting.”
Meiser truly values the contributions of his young workforce.
“If you come to work for Rothschild Downes, we are going to train you to be Owner’s Rep’s and business people first; use your skills as an architect, train you in construction management, blend it all together and hopefully you will become a long-term employee that is sustainable based on your ability to provide all, multi-faceted services to our clients,” Meiser said.