Watch Webinar: Running an Architecture Firm with Your Spouse — Behind the Scenes

Hear designers Rob and Kassia Zinn from Zinn Architecture + Interiors discuss how they balance their home and studio lives.

At CVG, we speak with small architecture firm leaders every day -- and we make lots of interesting observations, such as the number of design teams that are led by married couples. This invariably leads to the internal conversation:

“What’s it like to run a design business with your spouse?”
“How do decisions get made -- and business conflicts get resolved?”
“Does the design collaboration work differently than non-married colleagues?”
“How do they separate work and home life?”
and…”I bet they have some good stories about this!”

So we decided to sit down with two of our favorite married architects (and clients), Rob and Kassia Zinn, for a casual chat about what really goes on behind the scenes in their business, Zinn Architecture + Interiors, and how they make the whole thing work…

About the Zinns

Kassia Zinn

Kassia is the President of Zinn A+ I. Not just on paper. She is the solid center of our office - the one everyone asks for advice, guidance, and how to craft the perfect email. The consummate diplomat, she is unruffled by the sometimes messy business of turning lines on paper into 3- dimensional structures, all through the medium of a 3rd-party contractor. She is also not afraid to speak up when you're just being silly. Kassia went to UF for undergrad and completed her graduate studies at Parsons School of Design in New York where she was awarded the prestigious Michael Kalil Fellowship Grant for her research on disaster site utilization and the role of destruction itself in the creation of space.

Rob Zinn

Rob is a Capricorn, so nerding-out over everything from flashing details to how cities could work better comes naturally. Rob also tried everything as he grew up, basically not knowing you couldn't or shouldn't. From experimenting with model rocket launches to restoring antique vehicles by hand, he enjoys trying new things and bringing technical chops to bear on the far-fetched. “Architects shouldn't really know how to do every skill needed on a job site, but they should know enough about all of it to work intelligently with the craftspeople executing the work”. Meanwhile, he doesn’t let “well we've never done it like that before” get in the way of pushing the envelope a little. Rob also went to UF for graduate school where he met Kassia after attending Boston University for, you guessed it, pre-med with a double major in English Literature and Art History.