Today we’d like to introduce you to Rebecca Bradley and Gage Couch.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Rebecca and Gage. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
In the late 2000s, we witnessed the rise and fall of the market. Both of us were working in a corporate setting for nearly a decade leading up to the recession. The extreme uncertainty we experienced motivated us to evaluate what was important, and how we could do things differently. Together, we set out to combine our years of work experience and a reimagined mindset to start a business committed to filling the void of local progressive landscape architecture firms serving the immediate needs of the rapidly developing urban landscape here in South Florida.
We founded Cadence in 2010 based on one simple ethos, The Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It seems overly simple but after a decade in the professional world, we saw how often companies, clients, fellow colleagues were not behaving in this manner, we knew this was needed in the business environment, especially a professional service that is affecting physical and cultural landscapes of our communities.
Heading into our 10th year, we are now a team of six people with a studio space located in Fort Lauderdale’s FATVillage Art District. As a Xennial (born between the late 1970s and early 1980s) lead office, we believe that our upbringing harmonizes a perfect fusion of an analog childhood with digital adulthood, uncommon to many established firms. As part of this micro-generation, we can easily adapt to technological advances within our field, we understand the results of hard work and we have experienced organic relationships both inside and outside of social media. Our team is passionately dedicated to our projects and to each other, we are a small but mighty force and we all play an integral role in the success of Cadence. Our open studio environment creates a foundation for us to inspire one another, to challenge ourselves, to create our best work and to effect change.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It has been a fun ride, but it always hasn’t been a smooth road. Both of us are hard workers with an entrepreneurial spirit, so this never scared us. We bootstrapped the startup of the business which was financially challenging, but we found ways to creatively navigate incurring too much overhead at the beginning. We worked from dining room tables and coffee shops and even shared a laptop between the two of us for the first six months. We were patient enough to wait two years to rent an office space, and then begin hiring employees to build the team. Hiring can be also a challenging endeavor, but we’ve developed a good process to match skill sets and personalities with our team in place. This doesn’t always work out, but we’ve set a good track record so far.
One particular challenge we face on a regular basis is the common misperception of the profession of landscape architecture. Landscape Architecture plays a great role in how cities are planned, shaped and experienced, yet we are often a profession which goes unrecognized or a profession which is easily misunderstood. We find ourselves regularly fighting for a voice at the development table, especially in the South Florida region. We recognized this challenge and have deliberately turned it into a positive for our business. Through our social media outlets and direct advocacy outreach, we educate and communicate the value and benefits of our profession. Using our online channels for social good, we help influence our local community on topics of resilient community design, climate change, and importance of access to nature for all, even in urban cities. This effort also allows us to build connections with other designers to take action within their own community.
Please tell us about Cadence.
Cadence is a landscape architecture practice focused on connecting physical and social landscapes. As landscape architects, we vow to create places which serve the higher purpose of social and ecological justice for all people and species. We view each new project as an opportunity to transform how we interact with the environment, while simultaneously balancing the triple bottom line: People, Planet, Profit. We work closely and collaborate with allied professionals to design with conscious regard for nature, our clients, and our community. Our clientele includes public entities, private foundations, architects, commercial developers, private landowners, and hoteliers.
Besides traditional landscape architecture projects, Cadence focuses on a wide variety of community engagement projects as well as using our design and solution based thinking for the greater good of our communities. We believe in social responsibility and conscious capitalism, so we often integrate ourselves into projects with a social good component such as non-profits and schools. We hope we inspire others to support these organizations to thrive in our communities or trigger a thought inside someone in another community to support their local organizations.
We also pride ourselves in quality design solutions which are unique to each project, but timeless to age with the project and design trends. Design details hold high importance in our studio, as does a full understanding of planting design. With over 115 completed projects, we are also heavily involved in the construction phase of projects and often spend just as much attention on a project during the construction process as we do during design phases. We have found that investing time to build relationships with competent general and subcontractors helps to deliver a quality project about how it was designed.
What’s your outlook for the industry in our city?
Yes, landscape architects are needed in every city, but especially throughout South Florida. There is ample development within our cities, but not enough innovative design firms working within the urban design realm to serve it. Resilient cities and neighborhoods of the future recognize that the identity of the land should not be viewed as leftover space in between buildings. Instead, these areas should be utilized as an integral system to assist our cities’ infrastructure, while simultaneously allowing social systems to flourish. The way in which we interact and connect with the land greatly impacts the social, environmental and economic composition of a place. We passionately believe there is a need in Fort Lauderdale to use this expertise in design to effect change and fix an environment that is in need of attention, both physically and socially. It’s an exciting place to be with a vast amount of opportunity, but it’s not for the faint-hearted; the cost of living is high, the roads are becoming more congested and the urban green spaces are dwindling. For landscape architects, this means we need to be the catalyst for smarter growth and more resilient design approaches to help improve our public spaces and natural land.
Contact Info:
- Address: 435 N Andrews Avenue, No. 2
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301 - Website: cadence-living.com
- Phone: 954-766-4572
- Email: ftl@cadence-living.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cadenceliving/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CadenceLiving/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/CadenceLiving
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/cadenceliving/
Image Credit:
Cadence and Michael Stavaridis
Ryan Stone Photographed our BW portrait.
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