America’s Best-in-State Residential Architects 2025 Methodology

“Architecture is culture politics.”

_{—Kenneth Frampton}

It’s been less than a year since Forbes launched its architecture program with America’s Top 200 Residential Architects, and in that period of months, contrary to the homebuilding industry’s typically unhurried pace of substantive change, the normally arduous process of getting a new house built is suddenly even more problematic. And really, could anyone not have seen it coming? Sure enough, from Maine to Montana, architects have shared with us the far-reaching effects of the bidding nightmares and general builder and client trepidation unique to this new era of the surprise tariff…and the seemingly never-ending threats of the same. Is the sudden skyrocketing of building-materials prices an industry “new normal”—for at least, well, the next three years? Meanwhile, and more strictly on the consumer end of the equation, the influencer’s standing within the social media sphere continues its upward ascendancy in cultural authoritativeness, even in architecture. Ever the more susceptible to falling into the “hyperreality” trap in our comprehension and relational capacities as consumers, we continue to fumble, media saturated, with the great disparity between “information” passively gained from images on social platforms and actual first-hand learned experience. Should you happen to think the latter topic isn’t urgent, or at the very least worth airing and really talking about within your own circle, you might go out and look around a nearby residential neighborhood that has new single-family-house construction in progress. There, the expression of an authentic architecture of place—a house design and its construction that dissents from influencer narrative and is, instead, conceived and executed with the local cultural values, the local climate, and the given topography of the building site as its guiding factors—is increasingly difficult to find.

Now having painstakingly conducted that research ourselves, in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, for the purpose of our inaugural America’s Best-in-State Residential Architects List, we’re that much clearer about the critical importance of the role of the architect in society in 2025, the critical importance of finding the right architect, locally. America’s Best-in-State Residential Architects will be designed to provide just that access.

America’s Best-in-State Residential Architects, as with all Forbes lists, will be based on rigorous journalistic fact-finding and assessment, highlighting designers of single-family houses whose work stands apart for its excellence in the combined context of high design and distinctly place-based principles and practices of design and construction. Free of entry fees, the Forbes list is open to the entire field of single-family-residential practice.

As a matter of course, the firms of Forbes’s America’s Top 200 Residential Architects, 2025, being the top 200 firms in the nation, were automatically positioned to represent their primary state of operations in America’s Best-in-State Residential Architects. Completing the list, bringing it to a total of 400 firms, would require new research, several months in all. To this end, the search process that had been conducted for Top 200 in 2024 was not only repeated but greatly expanded. State to state, drawing from the membership bases of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (ICAA), and from architecture organizations, awards-and-recognition programs, and professional directories, both national and local, a total of more than 20,000 offices were identified and their websites and published works assessed (or, as in the case of those firms that had been considered for 2025’s Top 200, re-assessed) for the degree to which the single-family house is currently a part of their total repertoire.

In this sweeping first-pass evaluation, those firms that displayed work generally meeting the Forbes Architecture criteria were invited to submit an exemplary house completed in 2018 or later for further evaluation. Each submission, more than 1,000 in total, was then assessed according to the Forbes Architecture System of Evaluation, the three-tiered system with its seven categories of guiding principles and best practices. With our inaugural America’s Best-in-State Residential Architects, we will reveal the outcome—residential architecture’s most state of the art in 2025, state to state.

The Forbes Architecture System of Evaluation

Tier 1: General Professional Evaluation

a. Integrity of online presence (quality of photography; professionalism of display; informational value; awards; publication history; etc.)

b. Educational background of the firm’s principals

c. Work histories and mentorships

Tier 2: Evaluation of a single “Exemplary House”

a. The measuring of Stability; Utility; and Beauty

Tier 3: Evaluation Relative to Forbes Architecture’s Residential Guiding Principles & Best Practices, the seven categories of which are as follows:

1. Siting and Local Context

· Respects and aims whenever possible to preserve natural landscape contours, while minimizing excavation overall

· Respects the solar envelope over its own site and, consequently, over that of the neighboring houses

· Strategic incorporation of existing land forms (berms, slopes, etc) and landscape to climatic advantage (for wind shielding, storm protection, etc.)

· Rooms planned according to the ideal solar orientation per function of the specific spaces

· Adapted to sea-level-rise and flood-risk projections

2. Architectural Form and Detailing

· Balanced expression of form and massing, conscious of climatic response in approach, while honoring the fundamentals of any origins that might be the basis of the design

· Honors cultural and environmental contexts

· Structural principles elegantly and honestly expressed

3. Building Materials and Craft

· A curated approach to selection and application primarily guided by the impositions of the local climate zone and the cardinal directions

· Meticulous attention to expression of architectural detailing—at the smallest levels, materials and geometry in alignment; thematic consistency, inclusive of variations; with emphasis on the relationship of parts to the whole

· Use of indigenous and locally sourced, or repurposed, materials and employment of local artisans

· Use of Forest Stewardship Council-Certified wood and wood products

4. Spatial Configuration

· Entry is prioritized, treated as an experience

· Adventurous, stimulating plan circulation, with movement decidedly choreographed, ideally with appropriate/effective moments of compression and expansion

· Integrative of any outdoor rooms and garden spaces—programmatic relationships between indoors and exterior context

· Strategic mechanical-, electrical- and plumbing-integration consideration

· Accommodation for flexibility and change in use

5. HVAC and Tech

· Whole-house passive solar heating

· Electric radiant floors

· Electric-dominant, remotely controllable whole-house systems

· Use of architectural shading devices

· Inclusive of “smart home” lighting automation systems

· Thorough provisions for natural ventilation

6. Physical and Psychological Effects

· Emphasis on space perception

· Integration of sound-reduction strategies to control the interior environments

· Immersive, transformative, soothing environments

· Natural light harnessed as an instrument for mood creation

7. Environmental | Appropriateness to Region and Local Climate Zone

· Material circularity factor

· Green infrastructure

· Meets or exceeds green residential-building codes

· Raises bar of “responsibility” within its community for its example

· Designed and built to withstand extreme climate conditions