We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Zachary Verhulst. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Zachary below.
Hi Zachary, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
Resilience is an interesting subject, as it is relative and very individualized. Resilience, to me, is being able to suffer through hardship, uncertainty, stress, and adversity, and instead of being overwhelmed by those experiences, you are able to use them to grow, learn, and evolve. Much of my time is spent doing hard things and being resilient affords me the space to be optimistic and future-facing. I think my resilience, or my ability to be resilient, is partially an innate thing I can’t describe, in addition to practicing very hard on maintaining a perspective rooted in optimism, abundance, and gratitude. I can see the silver lining in hard things and, ultimately, I believe that all things will work out how they’re supposed to. Lastly, I’ve been blessed with extremely supportive people in my life and they give me confidence to push on through hardship and they keep me focused on the important things.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I’m Zach Verhulst, a 36 year old Grand Rapids native. I have one of those stories where I met my wife when I was five. She’s the best by the way, and make this whole thing go around, to be clear. Together we have three daughters, Monroe who is 7, and we have twins, Marleigh and Mikah, who are 4. I’m a product of Grand Rapids’ Public Schools. I am a Covell Tiger, Westwood Mustang, and Union Redhawk. Growing up, my dad owned multiple contracting companies, one of which I worked for from 12 to 22 years old. I learned to manage people, fulfill promises to clients, sales and marketing, and how to estimate, order, and read site plans. After High School, I went to Grand Valley State University for general education classes and started to major in Graphic Design. Through relationships, I met an Architect, Isaac Norris, who allowed me to work tightly with him. I learned what a Architect was at 19 years old and immediately fell in love with profession. It marries together business, art, physics, and creative people which are all of my favorite things!
In the Spring of 2020, I left a large firm to found Pure Architects; a disruptive studio driven to deliver great design work in new ways. Despite COVID and the inability to connect with people face to face, we started off quickly winning work and delivering exceptional outcomes. Today, I lead over twenty architects and designers between Grand Rapids and Detroit, and our success is rooted in a clear mission and vision to use design to do good in the world. We are a commercially focused practice providing expertise in designing spaces where people spend a lot of time, so places of work, learning, healing, and living across nearly all markets. We are obsessed in building a “process over product” mindset which allows us to work at multiple scales, in multiple markets, in multiple states, and be successful delivering in different delivery methods for nonprofit and for-profit clients.
We recently purchased a building on West Leonard and are constructing our offices there. We will occupy the entire second floor and part of the third floor before the end of the year. We are working on a WELL Certification also as we believe in that process and framework as a design tool.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I think first you have to define what impact means for you and where you’re hoping it will take you. Specifically for me, related to the things I want to achieve; consistency, discipline, and trust are critical elements. Skills can be learned or honed, but values, or qualities in which you operate, are transferrable. Skills are important, as they build utility in people and add value to the world, but values create the context in which they’re used. My advice in building these qualities in yourself is to find the edge of your areas of comfort and live there for a bit. Do things that are hard, follow through, and show up, for years.
Who is your ideal client or what sort of characteristics would make someone an ideal client for you?
Our current and future ideal clients are passionate about healthy, high-performing buildings, they prioritize human beings in their design decision making, actively innovating inside of their own organizations, mutually accountable to each other and the goals established, and they’re open-minded and willing to push how value is delivered by designers. We are business minded so we spend our clients’ money like its ours, focusing on first costs, operational expenses over time, and their goals for return on investment. We get to know their business and align the architecture to the goal of the project; whether it be occupant health, improving productivity, education or health outcomes, or revenue generation.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.purearchitects.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/purearchitects/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PureArchitectsGR/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pure-architects/
Image Credits
CRZ Photography, Carbon Stories
