The Martin Architectural Group

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The Martin Architectural Group Award-winning Architects and Planners committed to delivering the highest quality designs. No two projects are alike.

Established in 1967, THE MARTIN ARCHITECTURAL GROUP's rise to success was initiated by a desire to plan, design, document and deliver the highest quality professional services to the private sector, real estate and development industry. Our commitment to client service and design excellence has remained strong and as a result, the firm has cultivated a diverse and accomplished portfolio of single and multi-family homes, senior living communities, retail and office designs, mixed-use and transit-oriented developments, and sustainable projects. The firm's greatest asset is our core team of ARCHITECTS AND LAND PLANNERS with a solid supporting cast of designers, project managers, technical personnel as well as administrative staff. Collectively, our group possesses talent and experience in all aspects of the development spectrum, from planning through design and construction documentation. We keep abreast of the latest technologies and marketplace trends by remaining active in the American Institute of Architects, American Planning Association, National Association of Home Builders, International Council of Shopping Centers, United States Green Building Council, and Urban Land Institute. Whether working on smaller-scale residential and commercial projects or more complex master-planned, mixed-use communities, we maintain our dedication to FUNCTIONAL AND INNOVATIVE DESIGN. Our visually distinct, yet livable designs have garnered regional and national recognition because of their ability to respond to each site's unique context. By taking into consideration how people will interact with the specific space, structure, and surroundings, we are able to create places that perform as well as excite, and continue to enrich the community far into the future. For that reason, we consider each site independently, addressing the practical concerns of schedules and budgets, while also acknowledging the importance of the BETTERMENT OF THE BUILT, NATURAL, AND SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTS. With the recent introduction of The Martin Green Studio, we have taken a more invested role in harmonizing environmental protection and land development objectives by offering our clients the option to explore sustainable solutions that engage their visions and respect their limitations. We aim to cultivate a sense of place and ultimately, enhance quality of life. INTEGRITY AND THE UNDERSTANDING OF OUR CLIENT'S GOALS are essential elements in our design process an honest expression of all those invested in a project including ourselves, the client, and the community. As valued collaborators, our clients are engaged throughout the entire life of the project in an effort to foster a shared trust and to completely understand the opportunities and challenges of the site, program, and market. We take pride in both establishing and maintaining relationships with our clients, many of whom have worked with us repeatedly over the years.

The The Grove at Newark Tour and Reception with the Drexel Real Estate Alumni Network on October 6th.Two of our partners...
09/17/2026

The The Grove at Newark Tour and Reception with the Drexel Real Estate Alumni Network on October 6th.

Two of our partners, Drew Romanic and Dan McCauley, will be presenting at The Grove at Newark Tour and Reception, hosted by Drexel University's Real Estate Alumni Network.

📅 Tuesday, October 6, 2026
🕕 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
📍 Compass at The Grove, 1001 Compass Way, Newark, DE 19711

The Grove at Newark is a 46-acre transformation of a former retail center into a vibrant, mixed-use destination — combining 306 luxury apartments (Compass at The Grove), and 325,000 SF of retail and dining, a new community green, and 1.5+ miles of walking and bike trails just a mile from the University of Delaware campus.

Drew and Dan will walk attendees through the project's journey — from land planning and entitlements to design and delivery — their involvement in master planning and design of both the retail and residential components, and share lessons learned along the way.

Whether you're a Drexel alum, a fellow real estate professional, or simply curious about what it takes to reimagine a shopping center into a true live-work-play community, please join us, we'd love to see you there.

🔗 Register here: https://lnkd.in/g2FsrcmF

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20+ years. 20+ malls. One region-defining specialty.At The Martin Architectural Group, we've spent the last two decades ...
08/20/2026

20+ years. 20+ malls. One region-defining specialty.

At The Martin Architectural Group, we've spent the last two decades helping owners and institutional investors answer the hardest question in retail real estate: what comes next for the struggling enclosed mall?

The answer is rarely one thing. Sometimes it's a full teardown and rebuild as a walkable, mixed-use town center. Sometimes it's a surgical repositioning — targeted anchor replacement and a new front door, without touching the bones. And sometimes it starts even earlier, with a feasibility or density study that tells an owner what the site can actually support before a single wall comes down.

Across more than 20 sites from the Mid-Atlantic core to the Gulf Coast (and beyond), a few patterns keep showing up:

🏗️ Full transformations — complete reinventions: enclosed malls rebuilt from the ground up into vibrant, multi-family-anchored town centers, with grocers added, main street access to retail, and outdoor restaurant patios.
Annapolis Town Center (formerly Parole Mall)
Town Center at Laurel (formerly Laurel Mall)

🎯 Surgical repositionings — targeted intervention — new facades, reworked circulation, right-sized retail — that resets a property's trajectory without a full teardown, often with reduced square footage, malls opened up for outdoor access, green spaces and plazas, and multi-family additions.
Hunt Valley Towne Centre
Promenade at Granite Run

📊 Feasibility & density studies — the due-diligence work that underpins smart capital decisions: what's the highest and best use, and what will it take to get there?
Lake Forest Mall
Mall at Glen Burnie
Owings Mills Mall
Exton Square Mall
Santa Rosa Mall

🔄 Repositioning studies — mapping the path forward for properties still weighing their options.
Annapolis Mall
Center at Forestville
Coventry Mall
Harrisburg Mall
Iverson Mall
Plymouth Meeting Mall
Springfield Mall
White Marsh Mall
Security Square Mall
Moorestown Mall
Oxford Valley Mall
Sequoia Mall
Dayton Mall (OH)
Sunset Mall (TX)

The throughline across all of them: retail gets right-sized, multi-family is introduced to bring rooftops, tax bases, and daily foot traffic, and experiential uses — fitness, grocery, entertainment — fill the gap that department stores left behind.

Every mall has a different story and a different owner's goals, but after 20+ years and 20+ of these projects, we've learned that the best outcomes come from pairing architecture with a clear-eyed read on the real estate fundamentals.

Proud of this body of work and the owners and investors who trusted us with some of the most complex site challenges in real estate.

08/20/2026

Our Studio in Wilmington, DE, Breckstone Architecture is proud to provide the Title Sponsorship for the 2nd Annual Wilmington International Film Festival , October 8th- 11th!

🏗️ Flashback Friday: The Tools That Built Us 🏗️Before CAD, before BIM, before you could Google a detail in three seconds...
08/07/2026

🏗️ Flashback Friday: The Tools That Built Us 🏗️

Before CAD, before BIM, before you could Google a detail in three seconds — we had a whole different toolkit. And honestly? A different kind of craft.

📐 Plastic templates and T-squares, dialed in just right on the parallel edge
✏️ Graphite and blue pencils, sharpened a hundred times a day
📄 Onion skin trace, layer after layer, chasing the right line
🪙 Taping pennies to the bottom of your triangle to lift it off the vellum — because nobody wanted a smudged ink line ruining hours of work
🖊️ Ink holders that could make or break your whole afternoon
🪑 Angled desks that somehow made 10-hour days feel almost bearable
And the resources? No search bar in sight.
📚 Sweet's Catalog was THE product resource — decades before Google, this was how you specified a door hinge or a curtain wall system
📖 Graphic Standards lived on every desk, dog-eared and coffee-stained, the bible for getting the details right

It was slower. It was more physical. You could smell the ink and hear the pencil on trace.
But there was something about drafting by hand that taught you to see a building before you ever built it, to learn how components went together, about physical connections.

To everyone who taped a penny to a triangle — you know.
What tool from back in the day do you still miss?

Excited to share a new photo collage capturing the spirit of Chevy Chase Lake! 🏙️The Martin Architectural Group proudly ...
07/23/2026

Excited to share a new photo collage capturing the spirit of Chevy Chase Lake! 🏙️

The Martin Architectural Group proudly served as Architect of Record, collaborating with Design Architect David M. Schwarz Architects to bring this vibrant, mixed-use community to life. Each team leveraged the collective strengths of their historic firms, culminating in this 530-unit mixed-use community.

The collage highlights a taste of what makes Chevy Chase Lake special: the open spaces, paving textures, tree lines, and retail activity that draw people together, and the connections and experiences woven between the three residential buildings. From the striking stained-glass art piece and fountain to the European-style woonerf, every detail was designed to create a walkable, welcoming neighborhood — with landscape architecture by Mahan & Rykiel Associates, Inc. elevating it all.

None of this would have been possible without our development partners:
🏗️ Developers: Bozzuto Development & CCLC
🔨 Contractor: Bozzuto Construction Company
🏢 Management: Bozzuto Management

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the largest housing affordability bill to come out of Congress in decades, built f...
07/13/2026

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the largest housing affordability bill to come out of Congress in decades, built from over 60 pieces of legislation.

The quick 6 slide snapshot gives you a peak into what was enacted.
What's actually included (and matters for housing costs).

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

"But what about the traffic?"It's the first objection in every zoning meeting, every comment section, every NIMBY talkin...
07/08/2026

"But what about the traffic?"

It's the first objection in every zoning meeting, every comment section, every NIMBY talking point. And for decades, it's gone unchallenged.

Turns out, the data tells a different story.

The two biggest fears cited against higher density homes— falling home values and gridlocked streets — don't hold up under scrutiny. Study after study shows the opposite: density raises property values, expands the tax base, fuels local business, and makes transit more viable. Schools and public services? They scale just fine, and higher density communities provide much lower per unit students than traditional single family homes.

The "not in my backyard" argument isn't caution. It's a myth built on outdated assumptions — and it's time to retire it.

Take a look at the top 5 NIMBY complaints, and the facts and stats.

Single-stair multifamily is gaining ground — and the numbers explain why!For decades, U.S. building codes effectively ca...
07/02/2026

Single-stair multifamily is gaining ground — and the numbers explain why!

For decades, U.S. building codes effectively capped small-footprint, single-stair apartment buildings at 3 stories. A handful of states — Montana, Texas, Colorado, New Hampshire (plus legacy cities like NYC, Seattle, and Honolulu) — have started expanding single-stair allowances beyond that. It's early, but the conversation is building real momentum, and The Martin Architectural Group is deeply involved in the discussion.

A few numbers from our latest cost comparison:
🏗️ 5-story / 20-unit building: $5.29M (two-stair) vs. $4.79M (single-stair) — ~$503K saved using single stair design
🏗️ 6-story / 24-unit building: $6.97M (two-stair) vs. $6.31M (single-stair) — ~$662K saved using single stair design

Roughly 9.5% of total construction cost recovered at every height tier modeled, as well as RSF increase just by reclaiming the square footage and circulation cost of a second stairway! That is construction cost savings, and doesn't even factor in the gained revenue for space converted to RSF!

A few important caveats:
⚠️ Adoption is entirely dependent on local municipal acceptance — this is not yet a universal code path, and jurisdictions are moving at very different paces.
⚠️ Going beyond 3 stories with a single stair typically requires additive life-safety measures — things like enhanced sprinkler coverage, fire-rated assemblies, smoke control, and egress width adjustments — to offset the loss of a redundant exit path.
⚠️ These measures add cost back in, so actual savings will vary by jurisdiction, fire marshal requirements, and project specifics. The figures above are illustrative, not a guarantee.

Insurance companies will weigh heavily n the true viability of the economics of the project. Their perceptions may very well change as more data and safety information comes to the forefront. Until then, be aware!

Although national code changes are proposed to include 4 story heights, this is still an emerging conversation, not a settled one — but the early traction across multiple states suggests it's worth watching closely, especially for anyone working on small-footprint infill housing.

Our firm continues to explore multifamily and "Missing Middle" solutions and land planning techniques and evolutions with building science.

Thanks to a proposed New Jersey state law, redeveloping a struggling mall, shopping center, or office park may soon be o...
06/29/2026

Thanks to a proposed New Jersey state law, redeveloping a struggling mall, shopping center, or office park may soon be on the fast track!

Senate Bill 1766 takes direct aim at two crises at once — the housing shortage and housing affordability — while giving last century's retail and office stock a real path to future-ready, mixed-use life.

The bill cuts through some of the biggest hurdles developers face today:

🔹 No use variance required for qualifying conversions — projects become a permitted use

🔹 Planning boards must approve eligible applications, removing discretionary delay

🔹 Statewide density & bulk standards replace a confusing town-by-town patchwork

🔹 Long-term tax exemption eligibility for qualifying redevelopment areas

In exchange, projects must meet real thresholds — vacancy history, good-faith leasing efforts, and at least 20% affordable housing — but for owners sitting on underperforming assets, this could be one of the clearest paths to reactivation New Jersey has offered in years.

This is exactly the kind of transformation The Martin Architectural Group has spent years preparing for. Our team brings deep land planning and architectural experience in mall revitalizations and multifamily design — the expertise needed to navigate the bill's requirements, energize stalled sites, and lead clients through every hurdle from concept to approval.

If you own or manage a struggling retail center, mall, or office park in New Jersey, now is the time to start the conversation.

The Secret Sauce-Smaller Density Residential Pro & Con Lists:🏡 Single-Family Detached"Pros"By-right in nearly every zoni...
06/23/2026

The Secret Sauce-Smaller Density Residential Pro & Con Lists:
🏡 Single-Family Detached
"Pros"
By-right in nearly every zoning district — fewest entitlement hurdles
Highest buyer familiarity, easiest financing
No shared walls — best privacy
"Cons"
Lowest density and value-per-acre of any type¹
Highest per-unit infrastructure cost (roads, utilities, stormwater)¹

🏘️ Townhouses
"Pros"
2 to 3 times the density of detached single-family on the same footprint¹
Fee-simple ownership — easier financing than condos
Shared party walls cut framing cost per unit
"Cons"
Fire-rated party walls add code complexity²
Many municipalities cap unit counts or lot widths

🏘️ Duplex / "Two-Over-Two"
"Pros"
Doubles density on a single-family lot, minimal scale change
Lower per-unit cost than detached (shared foundation/roof/wall)³
"Cons"
Two egress paths, often two utility services
Vertical stacking needs fire-rated floor/ceiling assembly²

🏗️ 3-Story, 12-Unit Apartment, Single-Stair
"Pros"
Cuts circulation area to ~9–12% of floor space vs. ~18% with a second stair, creating more rentable square footage⁴
Can lower construction costs an estimated 6–13% vs. standard two-stair buildings⁴
Fits narrow infill lots that can't support a double-loaded corridor
"Cons"
After 3 stories in height- Not by-right in most U.S. municipalities — only where code is amended²
Base IBC caps unamended single-stair multifamily at 3 stories and 4 units per floor²
Requires full sprinkler coverage, added fire compartmentation

🏗️ 4-Story Stick-Framed, Surface-Parked Apartments (Type V/III)
"Pros"
Wood framing is among the lowest-cost construction types per square foot³
Surface parking runs ~$1,500–$10,000/stall vs. $20,000–$50,000+ for structured⁵
Widely permitted by-right in multifamily/mixed-use zones
"Cons"
Surface parking consumes the most site area per unit, cutting density⁵
Capped at 4 stories under Type V without a non-combustible podium²
More impervious surface, more stormwater management

Footnotes
APA / CNU — fiscal-impact and missing-middle research on value-per-acre and infrastructure cost by housing type.
ICC — 2021 IBC egress, fire-rating, and Type V height/story limits.
NAHB — Survey of Construction data on per-square-foot cost by structure type.
CNU — circulation-area and cost comparisons, single-stair vs. two-stair multifamily.
ULI — Urban Land research on surface vs. structured parking costs.

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Wednesday 9am - 5pm
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