Dream Team

Award-winning design firm Best Practice Architecture is excited to announce a leadership addition: Kailin Gregga, AIA, LEED-AP+BD C, has been promoted to Partner, now sharing the firm’s helm with founder Ian Butcher. Best Practice sets itself apart as a firm with a distinct, upbeat spirit. Decisive and agile, the firm develops their own logic, language and subsequent experience. Joining Best Practice in 2014, Kailin is a strong conceptual thinker, bringing a wondrous capacity to visualize and work through programmatic needs of any scale. Acting as one of the firm’s creative leads, Kailin is nimbly able to capture the subtleties that make spaces special.

What sets Best Practice apart goes beyond the exceptional work the firm does: It’s also a pretty special place to work. It is a rarity in architecture that half of the staff is comprised of talented women, LGBTQ and minority architects & designers. The firm’s core beliefs reflect an emphasis on creativity, balance, and community.

Kailin: “While we want people to share their creativity with us at work, we know that true creatives have curious and full lives, with goals, dreams and projects that take place outside of our office setting. If people have time and space to grapple with their own personal creative challenges, they get to flex their design and problem-solving muscles. We see it as part of our job to help people become who they want to be, our employees, our clients, our friends, ourselves!” Sometimes this translates into time off, taking time for a class, a walk, or to complete a mural–other times this help is offered as a barter for services with an artist, or lending a truck to haul materials around.

“Our own firm design philosophy affirms that a whimsical sense of discovery is tantamount for both the designer AND the user,” Ian Butcher explains. The focus on balance, creativity and relationships has earned the firm a distinct reputation of effortlessly blending a laser-focused and effective approach with being easy-going, unpretentious, and fun.

Best Practice is known for adept use of color and original architectural compositions of space and
materials. Collaborative in spirit, the firm looks for every opportunity to work closely with local craftspeople and manufacturers in the creation of custom lighting, furniture, and installations. Because the practice is small and spans multiple project types, this leads them to routinely invent solutions that are fresh and atypical for their context.

In their residential work, the firm’s focus is ‘density in our own backyards,’ engaging with clients who
are interested in adding density in the form of DADUs, ADUs, renovations to homes as well as small multi-family projects. The Best Practice team seeks new solutions to housing challenges in growing cities like Seattle, using their practice to alter the existing single family fabric while creatively countering the NiMBY-isms that come along way. For their commercial work, the firm continues to focus on small retail projects as incubators of design ideas and creative outlets.

Leading up to this change, Best Practice last year received AIA Seattle’s “Home of Distinction” honor, as well as a coveted AIA Honor Award for the firm’s work on Big Mouth House, pictured above. AIA of the Northwest and Pacific Region awarded Best Practice their “Emerging Firm” award in 2019.