At OBMI, architecture is shaped first by where it stands, by the climate it must answer to, and the landscape it belongs in. That holds whether the work is building new or drawing something fresh from a structure that already exists. Either way it is made to hold its value and its meaning for decades. This way of working was formed over our long history in hospitality, where how a place feels is inseparable from how it works, and the same thinking informs how we approach every kind of project.

“What we're very different at is the contextual nature of how we approach it. It's the no-ego approach. It's not about us putting a building there; it's what the place tells you should be there.”

Andrés Osorio,

Associate Principal, Hospitality

Every project responds to its context. How a structure meets the ground, how it frames a view and what it leaves out, how it manages light and shade across the day and the seasons, how arrival is choreographed so that a guest's first impression is already the beginning of the story: these are the decisions a place is remembered by. Ninety years of practice has given OBMI an instinct for getting them right, earned by having lived with the consequences.

“Designing for the senses is trying to activate all the senses when a person walks into a place. When you trigger an emotion or a feeling, that's how it lingers, how it becomes a memory. We like to see OBMI's identity as form that follows feeling. We begin our first lines with emotion.”

Nadeen & Shereen El Margoushy,

Senior Lead Design Architects

Our architects understand how places run. How a kitchen serves a restaurant, what a bay size does to a room, what back of house a property needs, what a brand's standards will demand. That knowledge shapes the design from the first sketch. Where a client needs a decision and the evidence to support it, Strategic Advisory can be coupled with architecture.

Rosewood-Little-Dix-Bay — Rosewood Little Dix Bay, Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands

Angsana Real de la Quinta, Marbella, Spain

Villa_Katsura_Shore — Villa Katsura, British Virgin Islands

Hospitality is where our experience runs deepest, and what it has honed there now carries into private residences, palaces, and mixed-use developments. Read the place first, respond to what it asks for, and hold that response through delivery. In all of our projects we bring a client's vision to life, balancing the interests of everyone with a stake in it and meeting the commercial objectives it must satisfy. We design with the future in mind, for the people who will use these places long after we've gone.