Rachel Woodhouse

“There was never a formal mentorship program, but rather I learned by listening and watching the interplay of relationship dynamics and design services, and benefiting from the wisdom, experience, and generosity of amazing women.”

ArchNative, meet Rachel Woodhouse, NCIDQ!

Rachel is the principal and director of operations with Boston and Atlanta based Dyer Brown & Associates, and leader of the firm’s efforts in DEI. An interior designer by training, Rachel has over 20 years of experience serving the institutional and corporate markets. As Director of Operations at Dyer Brown & Associates, Rachel focuses on the firm management, playing a key role in successfully integrating new designers into the companies close-knit culture, while managing the organizational complexity of an ever-evolving firm.

Committed to championing diverse voices and experiences, Woodhouse and her colleagues believe that the best way to continue Dyer Brown’s five-decades-old tradition of leading and innovating is to draw from the largest and most diverse pool of talented designers possible. To do so, she leads efforts to strengthen relationships with nonprofit organization and academic institutions, aiming to increase opportunities for students of all experiences and backgrounds interested in architecture and design.

Tell us a little bit about your introduction to interior design and what made you want to pursue it as a career?

I am not someone who can say they dreamed of being a designer their whole life – I think that’s an important point. I came to design later in life after a liberal arts undergraduate education. Eventually it became clear that I wanted to be around creative people, and at the same time I was drawn to the tangible impact on the human experience of interior spaces. It’s a powerful thing and the sense of accomplishment makes me think I’m on the most rewarding career path I might have hoped for.

That feeling comes from collaborating productively with people, which engages my own creativity and problem-solving. Our clients are always interesting, challenging, dynamic, and never the same. Developing the skills of communication and effective collaboration are integral to our profession, which I was fortunate to learn from the inside here at Dyer Brown. One of the more valuable perspectives impressed upon me early on was “thinking like an owner,” something my former boss Roger Shepley would emphasize. Developing this skill puts me in a position to be able to advocate for our clients in our collaborative process, ensuring that their goals for organizational strategy and return on investment are not lost in the conversation about design.

“We need more designers of varied backgrounds – in both their education and their life experiences –because collaboration among designers with unique perspectives always produce better outcomes for the people we serve.”

You had started your academic career studying Psychology and English Literature? What caused you to shift focus and move to Interior Design? Were there any lessons learned during your time studying the first that you have applied throughout your career or your current profession?

It’s important for designers to be well-rounded individuals, with interests and perspectives drawn from outside of professional pursuits. My work for Dyer Brown draws on the whole of my education – in particular, training in critical thinking, art history and psychology have provided a foundation for the conceptual basis of design while helping preparing me for leadership roles. We need more designers of varied backgrounds – in both their education and their life experiences –because collaboration among designers with unique perspectives always produce better outcomes for the people we serve.

The ways in which my psychology studies play a role are subtle but relevant. It’s really important to be able to consider the perspective and motivations of our clients – that “thinking like an owner” is not something that the typical design education prepares you for adequately. The client can’t always articulate why they are not happy, and often they are too close to the issue to see clearly what it is. They need to know they are in capable hands, with no agenda other than their own, so we make it clear that as outsiders our only goal is to deliver the most successful project possible and get paid. (And maybe a future reference.) To be sure they have a voice for their ideas at every step, especially in the earliest parts of visioning, we provide structured ways to share, with guardrails, that gives them the confidence, the “permission” in a sense, to communicate without worrying about being judged. The same is true for those times when employees at multiple levels are involved in the process. Our approach effectively neutralizes the inherent power dynamics to get honest opinions and appraisals.

The psychology background also helps in day-to-day management of Dyer Brown’s operations. For example, there’s a dynamic among architects that results in a lack of sufficient focus on getting paid – and it’s even worse among interior designers, perhaps unsurprisingly a field dominated by women. Being able to identify the dynamic is the first step in being able to adjust and reprioritize, to stop acquiescing to someone else’s timeline, and to simply recognize that one’s skills have value and deserve timely recompense. (This is something we try to instill in our designers in our roles as mentors.) On the other side of the coin, we strive to remind ourselves that our designs have intrinsic value, beyond just getting paid for them. This view helps us avoid taking on work in which we are commoditized as a set of construction documents and a stamp – a scenario that was causing concern for us even before the proliferation of generative AI tools.

A slight tangent here about generative AI: As designers we are of two minds about it. As a tool that can produce multiple iterations of interior plans based on our input, it may mean our role transitions somewhat to being responsive editors rather than generators. This can be okay, as long as our value as creative, highly skilled professionals with depth and breadth of knowledge is still honored, respected, and fairly compensated. In the best case scenario, AI can improve our workflow and outcomes by giving us space to actually use and analyze the mountains of data we capture. What we need to guard against is the efforts of big brokerages to make designers and architects irrelevant by replacing us with software that produces construction documents.

In addition to being a partner at Dyer Brown & Associates, you are also the Director of Operations. Can you tell us a bit about what this role entails and what your day to day looks like?

I’m as surprised as anyone to find that I sincerely enjoy the business and operational side of leading a design practice, but at some point during my career with Dyer Brown I recognized the opportunity could bring new levels of fulfillment. Seeing all the ways that day-to-day and long-term business decisions can impact our employees’ lives as well as our clients’ pursuit of their goals has been instructive and humbling.

What my days are like varies widely depending on the time of year and the current operational priorities. Lately we have been in recruitment mode, interviewing and onboarding new staff, which is one of the most energizing roles I have, both challenging and rewarding with so much thought about what each particular hire could mean for us. An organizational culture is like a living organism, requiring regular care and feeding. Daily I ask myself if we are doing what we need to do to nurture the firm culture, if we are communicating effectively, and embodying our core principles – in other words, to be what we say we are. With respect to culture, you can never “set it and forget it.” Maintenance, upkeep, nurturing – whatever word you prefer, the point is you have to keep working at it every day.

You oversee the firm's higher education studio, where you work with notable institutions such as Northeastern, Boston University, Harvard, and Emory. Tell us a little bit more about this initiative and what it means for the firm?

The work we do for higher education is so rewarding. I particularly love sitting in those early meetings with the faculty. It’s a privilege to hear from them their passion for their area of study, and how they envision a space that will be able to serve them and their students, which will ultimately serve the stated mission of the institution. Not to sound like a nerd but it’s legitimately thrilling. What I appreciate most about the people who work at and run those institutions is their passion for new ideas, though applying those ideas to designs for their own spaces will occasionally be at odds with best project outcomes.

At Dyer Brown we focus a lot of our effort on the early visioning sessions, which helps tease apart the initial ideas from what the client group really needs and identify which ideas will be truly valuable for the project. This is the case in our work for corporate workplaces as well – the latest trends and buzzwords sometimes get in the way of finding out what this specific organization and the people who work there actually need to support their day-to-day tasks as they pursue the larger mission. Our visioning process has been a critical part of our success, helping to reveal goals for projects that our client may not have even considered before.

On another note, the last few years have revealed just how much design for academic environments impacts health, for individuals and communities. The wellbeing of the users of spaces we design has been a big focus for us for years, so being able to learn more about this aspect of our work from the higher education sector and apply those lessons to our work more broadly – and to our own practice – has been invaluable.

You had started your career at Dyer Brown as a Senior Project Manager, tell us about the journey to becoming an executive at the firm?

When I started with Dyer Brown sixteen or so years ago the firm was much smaller and much more focused geographically on work in Boston, where we are headquartered. During the 2008 recession things were tight and there was a gap in leadership that I sort of intuitively identified and grew to fill.

At one point I was on a maternity leave, during which I learned that our predecessor Roger Shepley was working on a succession plan to ensure the firm’s future. I felt that I should play a leading role in that future, so to speak. Around that time he invited me for coffee to see how my perspective may or may not have changed while away from the office. He told me he would be selling our Wellesley location and begin working on our eventual transition to Downtown Boston. I asked if he would consider me for that, and he replied that he would love to see me grow that way. Then I got stung by a bee.

I’m not kidding! At this pivotal moment in my career in this outdoor café setting I was stung by a bee. I said to Roger that I need to go to the bathroom, and find some ice. I was rather mortified, doing my best to attend to first-aid needs while trying to maintain my composure. When I came back to our table, Roger complimented me on how calmly I’d handled the situation. It was a profound moment – the fact that he saw me as a person with leadership potential meant a lot to me. It still does. He decided to take a calculated risk on me, and it changed my life.

Murtha Cullina by Darrin Hunter, courtesy Dyer Brown & Associates

Did you have any mentors throughout your career? How did you meet them and what were their impacts on your career?

So many! Primarily they were women who I respected and liked being with. There were aspects of each of them that I admired and drew me into their orbits. I’m not sure if they intended to mentor me but they did anyway. I think maybe I just kind of got in their way, made myself unavoidable. I strove to make myself useful so that they would want me to accompany them to meetings and construction sites, or I would approach them and ask to talk through whatever design problem there was that day.

There was never a formal mentorship program, but rather I learned by listening and watching the interplay of relationship dynamics and design services, and benefiting from the wisdom, experience, and generosity of amazing women. I should mention that even negative moments can be mentorship. One senior leader I worked with told me that I needed to take more risks, that my career would not go anywhere if I kept playing it safe. But what they didn’t say is that young professionals need a supportive environment for risk-taking. That’s something I learned that much later, and strive to apply to my own mentorship activities.

Notably Sherri Rullen, a planning and construction director with Dana Farber, provided mentorship and inspiration. She taught me things I needed to know, and also would occasionally point at me and say something like, “you’re going to do things.” That kind of reinforcement by a mentor is invaluable. Another great mentor was a technically astute interior designer who refused to be condescended to – she knew what she knew, and what she didn’t know. One day she stood up for me in a room full of people, even when I had clearly made an error. That added to my already considerable respect for her, and it modeled for me a best practice for my own mentorship of young professionals.

You had spent a majority of your career at Dyer Brown, what values of the firm, or what projects, led you to want to continue to grow with them?

The most important core principle for us (and for me) is that ‘the firm is all of us’: together we can make Dyer Brown what we want it to be. The leadership team guides the firm’s progress but we often seek input from the entire team, including our newest and youngest. I stayed at Dyer Brown because I saw a firm where I could have meaningful impact and influence, and where individual contributions for the betterment of the whole really matter. That has remained true, even as we have grown and diversified. Many of our greatest initiatives have been driven by a mid-level or junior team member who we recognized as having the vision and follow-through to bring the initiative to fruition. That doesn’t happen everywhere. Our work in DEI is a great example: our staff have been enormously influential on this drive, which started as a structured conversation initiated by employees. Our middle and lower tier staff continue to lead on DEI efforts, which we consider to be one of our north-star principles along with sustainability and design excellence – our three lenses, we call them.

More recently our firm culture has adopted the principle of striving to be a leading-edge flexible firm. Roger Shepley, our leadership predecessor, moved Dyer Brown a long way toward where we are now, especially as regards the importance of our employees’ personal and family lives. We balance profit and great design with responsiveness to the human needs of our team members, and everyone our work impacts. Of course, balance is important, and flexibility goes both ways – sometimes you have to say no to a request and prioritize the firm.

Quickbase by Andy Ryan, courtesyDyer Brown & Associates

What has been the most impactful project or initiative you have worked on in your career and why?

What comes immediately to mind is the relationship we have formed through the Private Industry Council with the Dearborn STEM Academy, a local Boston high school. We now have a structured internship program for high school seniors that exposes them to a wide array of aspects of design practice. In this way we hope we are broadening and diversifying the pipeline of designers that eventually enter the AEC community. Not everyone has the privilege of exposure to design professions when they are young. We try to impart to our interns that the profession is a big tree with lots of branches, that there are a lot of things they can learn and pursue and many ways for them to make an important contribution. Architecture has a self-defeating pattern of elevating singular visionaries rather than celebrating all of the professions, trades, developers, and supporting communities that it takes to keep our built environment dynamic and strong. We hope our efforts will make a difference both for the individual interns and the AEC community as a whole.

Are there any books, podcasts, or other such resources that you continuously use throughout your career and would recommend to someone in the industry?

There aren’t any books in particular that come to mind, but I definitely recommend reading as much as you can of whatever seems worth reading, both fiction and non-fiction. I will say that I am reading almost exclusively women authors right now, and wondering if I will ever read a male author again. A few of the recent titles include a collection of stories by Kathleen Alcott called Emergency, as well as Circe by Madeline Miller, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, and Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. All of them are highly recommended – at least one of them I’ll be giving to my kid to read.

What would be one piece of advice you would give your younger self?

“This will be fine. It’s not all on you. Don’t worry, you can’t single-handedly burn anything down.” My younger self could have really benefited by hearing this kind of thing from someone I respect.

Gabriela Cortiñas Pagés