Small Business Superstars

Published on Tuesday, May 04, 2010

BY GLENN RITT

Peter Polhemus remembers vividly when his life changed forever. He was admiring a house he had just framed in Chatham as part of a construction crew. Sunlight was streaming from multiple directions through the open structure. He felt a rush of excitement as he contemplated the continuity of space before him.

“Then, I got really depressed,” he remembers. Soon, sheetrock would enclose all that openness into a predictable collection of small rooms, cutting off angles and sight lines, light and depth.

Right there and then, Polhemus envisioned a day when he would build homes distinguished by the same “openness and light that occurs in the framing stage.” He would do that by guaranteeing every detail, from its design to handing over the key.

He would take a leave of absence from Harvard, transfer to and graduate from The Goddard College Design Build program and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Architecture and Planning and work with architects such as Kyu Sung Woo, who designed the Seoul Olympic Village, and Ann Beha, who championed the preservation of our architectural heritage.

One of Polhemus’ first projects on his own was the design of a corner building in downtown Chatham after a fire. He hit it off with the builder, joined him and spent seven years establishing a design/build department. He decided to strike out on his own in 1996 and asked Len Savery, who worked for the same builder, to join him in an office they founded in Chatham. “For the first few months, we worked out of a single back room while we gutted the office,” recalls Polhemus, who began attending every Zoning Board of Appeals and Conservation Commission hearing he could. “I wanted to understand the process.”

“We believed our idea was elegantly simple: To be a high-end design/build company with timeless architecture and quality construction. We wanted to appeal to retirees and second-home owners coming to the Cape, motivated by place – its history, its extraordinary waterscapes and its natural beauty.”

Today, Savery has retired and John DaSilva – a Princeton- and Yale-educated architect – is a partner. Polhemus’ son, Aaron, has joined the firm as Chief Operating Officer, coordinating the work of 34 employees, a far cry from the two who started with the company. From four or five projects a year, the firm now manages as many as 20, ranging from small but special additions and renovations to large new homes and select commercial and institutional projects. At any one time the work is in various phases from site selection, to design and permitting, through construction and maintenance.

Meanwhile, a large residential project that 10 years ago may have cost $300,000 now would be among their smaller projects. The clientele has changed too. In addition to retirees, there are very active corporate and financial executives from Boston, New York, San Francisco, London, Paris and elsewhere who are building second homes and retirement homes here. “I feel incredibly fortunate to live here, make a living doing what I love and getting to know so many wonderful clients,” says Polhemus.

Aaron, who spent numerous summers working for the company while in school, graduated from the University of Vermont concentrating in sociology and business. He spent several years working as a field supervisor before assuming his current position. As Chief Operating Officer, Aaron oversees the business operations of the company, adding a powerful and holistic management system to coordinate everything from design through completion of a project. His emergence as COO has helped the company steadily expand its base beyond the Cape and Islands, to the South Shore and southern coastal New England. Aaron’s enthusiasm is apparent when he says, “While our clients are diverse, their need for clear and direct communication and hassle-free project management is universal. We are the only firm around that can deliver fine design, quality construction, budget and schedule control with single source accountability. It is a powerful model.”


THE ARCHITECTURAL PHILOSOPHY BEHIND THE BUILDING
DaSilva is the company’s architectural inspiration. Even as a young boy, his earliest memories involved experimenting with forms and space. “I was fascinated with mazes,” he recalls. As he grew older, he would get scraps from neighborhood construction sites and build forts, go-carts and other boyhood inventions.

After graduating from Princeton University, summa cum laude, and the Yale University School of Architecture, he worked for Cesar Pelli, whose firm has a global reach and has designed world-renowned buildings such as the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, as well as academic buildings for some of the country’s greatest universities. DaSilva also worked for Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the leading architectural theorists of our age and it was there that he met his wife, Sharon, also an architect who now works at Polhemus Savery DaSilva as well.

In 1998, Polhemus hired an executive search service to find a new partner who was an accomplished architect. “We love coastal New England, and the idea of living and working on Cape Cod appealed to both of us. So, I sent my resume along,” recalls DaSilva.

At the time, DaSilva was in his mid-30s. “I think I am rare to have settled on the Cape at a relatively young age for professional opportunity. We did not come to relax. We came to work hard and build a creative enterprise.”

DaSilva doesn’t go to the beach very often, nor does he golf, fish or kayak. Still, the Cape and the Islands are his lifeblood. He can hardly separate his design work from place.

“It is a blessing to live here in the context of such natural beauty – and it absolutely affects my work. It is very gratifying to be able to respond to that context creatively, to use it in our work and to be good stewards of it,” he explains.

That affinity with the environment also creates instant rapport with the firm’s clients, many of whom are baby boomer and younger executives who are very successful professionally – and bring with them a deep respect and love for the Cape and islands.

For DaSilva, philosophy and personality has merged with place. He finds the same to be a common thread connecting Polhemus Savery DaSilva’s otherwise diverse clients.

“One of the things that distinguishes us and makes it a lot of fun for me is that every project and every client is different. While our projects share some characteristics, they are always specifically suited to a particular client and a particular site. It is our role to draw the clients’ vision out of them – and they always have a vision, even when they don’t think so at the start.” ■


Published in Cape & Plymouth Business May 2010