Meredith Zoe
Architect, Founding Principal
meredith@omzarchitects.com
In my family, something as seemingly neutral as tile could start an argument. My father is an architect, and dinner rarely stayed on small talk for long before we slid into building review. Did the new house down the street purposefully have 25 steps to get to the front door. Did we love or hate the whimsical approach the new coffee shop took with their monumental signage. Did we agree that the tiled entryway for the historic downtown theater renovation was off by at least a decade, or did we feel like the juxtaposition was considered and appropriate. I’m Meredith, the architect behind OMZ, and I was forming taste and judgment at that table before I knew I’d make it my life. The way I see the built world was shaped there. The skill to shape that world came later.
The obvious path led straight to architecture school, but I deliberately took a different one. I studied art first — printmaking, sculpture, weaving, painting — until I understood what each medium and material could be asked to do. It’s why I can read what finish a transition wants, how a material will behave in a particular room, and how it will feel to the hand that meets it. For a few years I designed jewelry, turning wood, brass, and paper into pieces intricate enough to sit beside stones worth a hundred times more, carried by design museums and boutiques from San Francisco to Brooklyn. Working at that scale taught me that a single joint, the slightest transition, and the right detailing can elevate the whole design — that a refined move is often the one everything else answers to. Interior design came next, at the scale of a room, where I learned how a space meets a body: how a finish wears over years, how the same material reads differently at every scale, how the last ten percent — the trim, the hardware, the reveal where two surfaces meet — separates a room you admire from one you can’t bring yourself to leave.
I returned to architecture because it’s the one discipline wide enough to hold all of it at once – art, craft, material, structure, and the life a building is built to support. It’s how I design. Not in sequence, but all at once. Shaping the volume of a building, I already know how the spaces will be used, what will fill them, and how the materials will feel within them. Structure, finish, and feeling aren’t three separate problems. They’re one.
It’s why the projects that compel me are the ones everyone else has abandoned. When you can read the site, the structure, and the needs of the project in a single glance, what stops most people is where I start. Show me the slope others say to flatten, and I’ll find the way the house steps down and settles into the hillside you fell for. Show me the crumbling structure nobody wants, the one with a century of lives layered into it, and I’ll uncover the piece worth building everything around – the original tongue-and-groove ceiling, the salvaged steel windows, the stonework no one could buy or lay today. Show me the climate others fight with robust systems, and I’ll shape the house to work with it instead – regional methods, local materials, a house that belongs to the ground it stands on.
The design grows from the place and from you – even the client who can only say what they don’t want. I translate what you feel into something you’d never have known to ask for, until what gets built could only be yours.
Underneath all of it, what I’m really designing for is the part that’s hardest to photograph: how it feels to live there. That’s the work I care about – and I’d love to design your home.
What object in your house makes you happiest?
I have a rug from a Loloi Feroz x Justina Blakeney collab. It’s a tiger, but round like a very fat horny toad.
How do you take your coffee (and do you actually drink it)?
Cold brew, specifically Grady’s. I’m a slow sipper, but it eventually gets consumed.
Favorite road trip stop?
The end, when it’s done.
What kind of project lights you up?
Something with new and interesting constraints to work through and the trust from my clients that we’ll find the solution.
A material you secretly love using?
I am not great at keeping secrets. So my not-so-secret love is terrazzo and maybe my secret love is watching the development of Mycelium as a building material.
Dream collaboration?
Solange for an exhibition.
A recent hobby or obsession?
Chrome.
What space have you never forgotten?
During study abroad in Italy, my friend and I arrived last out of the twelve girls placed in one apartment. This apartment was two separate flats combined into one, and the only remaining room had clearly once been a foyer. A bookshelf pushed against the old entry door was the only effort to “convert” it into a bedroom. It looked into a narrow interior courtyard that was always dark, like a summer storm was coming. There was just enough space for two cots and a path to squeeze between them. It was sad, but strangely efficient. I still think about it when I’m planning tight spaces.