Interior Architect Candace Rimes on Rural Studio, Designing Locally + More

As director of interior architecture at Fogarty Finger and the top of the firm’s Atlanta office, Candace Rimes has designed environments for clients including Nike, Rockefeller Group, and Slater Hospitality. On this week’s Milkshake, we talked to her about how she builds her practice: how she ensures that her design world expands somewhat than shrinks with time – reusing familiar ideas, practices, and motifs – and the way her time at Auburn University’s acclaimed Rural Studio has informed her priority of constructing relationships with the members of the communities who share their lives along with her buildings.

“I might say that the Rural Studio instilled in me that as designers, we have now a responsibility to raised our communities — to feel personally responsible, not just for the spaces and the buildings that we design, but the best way people experience them and the way they feel within our spaces,” says Rimes. The Rural Studio, which was founded in 1993, was intended to interrogate the connection between architects and designers and people who inhabit their buildings, especially given its location in Hale County, Alabama, where many residents live in poverty. “I try to recollect a quote by Samuel Mockbee, founding father of the Rural Studio, that architecture must be greater than simply architecture. And I feel carrying that spirit forward into all of our work, we are able to really proceed to enhance our design practice every single day.”

512 West twenty second Street Photo: Connie Zhou

Elsewhere on this Milkshake, Candace shares how she keeps her design work fresh: travel. “Travel can really be so influential to your design practice – it could actually really expand your worldview,” she says. “Having just returned from Japan, I’m already seeing how a few of those experiences are influencing my design work, whether it’s lighting design, or transparency in architecture or connection to nature. Every time I’m traveling. I find that artists are all the time so tapped in and in tune with the local pulse and the stories that a spot can tell – I feel that I’m often so inspired by those stories which might be present in those local galleries every time I’m traveling.

1700 Broadway Club Photo: Connie Zhou

Rockefeller Group Photo: Connie Zhou

The Dime Photo: Alexander Severin

For more from Candace, tune in!

Milkshake, DMTV (Design Milk TV)’s first regular series, shakes up the normal interview format by asking designers, creatives, educators and industry professionals to pick out interview questions at random from their favorite bowl or vessel. During their candid discussions, you’ll not only gain a peek into their personal homeware collections, but additionally priceless insights into their work, life and passions.