By: Frank Witsil
Bob Kraemer, who with his wife runs Kraemer Design Group in Detroit, has been subtlety shaping how the city looks and feels.
His firm specializes in renovating historic buildings and delivering to his clients, which include companies owned by billionaire Dan Gilbert, designs that balance old and new.
“We really are renovation experts,” he said. “We can do renovations of office space, housing and hotels. And emerging in the last few years is high end retail.”
Kraemer, who was born in Mexico and lived there until he was 10 because his father was working there for General Motors, studied architecture at the University of Michigan on a scholarship from Albert Kahn Associates, the firm known for many of Detroit’s landmark buildings.
Kraemer earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from U-M, and then went to work for Kahn. He left Kahn after five year to join his wife, Maureen, who started the design firm. They now have about 30 employees and long list of metro Detroit projects.
We sat down with Kraemer, 46, and asked him about his vision for Detroit, his best design tip — and finding balance between preserving historic buildings and blowing them up.
QUESTION: What is your vision for Detroit should be and what it should look like?
ANSWER: It’s probably taken these 20 years to start to materialize. It’s gone in fits and starts, and now it feels like there is momentum. You saw it at Super Bowl time. There was this kind of resurgence downtown, and then it evaporated. The key is you have this millennial generation that is absolutely interested in urban living, the idea of no car, walk-ability. They aren’t looking for the big, suburban house. Less is more to them, but they want finer things. That adds up to living downtown. We’re fortunate Dan Gilbert and his partners are doing the work their doing. Ultimately, we’re finally seeing the density of people living here. It’s not where it should be, but there’s enough that there’s people walking around at night, and we see them with dogs and riding bikes during the day. That’s exciting. That brings the commercial side and retail. And it feeds on itself. In two to three years, we’re going to see more than doubling the number of the apartments down here.
Q: Is that where you see Detroit headed? More apartments?
A: We’ll see more apartments. There are people who want to purchase condos, but condos really aren’t available in the downtown corridor. There are plenty of potential purchasers, including myself. We would live downtown. Ownership will be the next step and that really stabilizes a neighborhood. The downtown in the freeway core is booming. Then, you also have the stuff happening in the district. That’s a 10 year plan. And the M-1 Rail will connect Midtown. Midtown is hot now.
Q: What is your best free design tip?
A: We always default to the historic color palette. Every paint manufacturer has a set of colors that are called historic. Those are the ones that have stood the test of time.
Q: Can we talk a little bit about your firm’s projects?
A: The most recent one that is best known is the David Whitney building. That building really showed a lot of what of what we do because we were the architects, the interior designers, the historic consultant and also the procurement agent for the project. All four components of our firm were involved.
Q: This past weekend the Park Avenue Hotel, nearly century-old building, was blown up to make way for a new Red Wings arena. What are your feelings about that?
A: We’re very supportive of that because of the nature of progress.
Q: In some ways, though, restoring the Park Avenue might have been the sort of project you worked on?
A: It could have been.
Q: So how do you decide what should go, what should stay?
A: Certainly, our customer is No. 1. Our customer has visions and then we sort of guide them. We believe that all cities evolve. We’ve all seen those video clips: The city starts off as a fisherman’s camp, then eventually it’s a fort, and the fort turns into a small town and it turns into a city. That’s how we work, can we improve upon it and go from there? I’m not a fan of tearing down a building to create a parking lot; but I am a fan of tearing down a building to create a bigger better building.
Bob Kraemer
Title: principal, managing member
Age: 46
Education: University of Michigan, bachelor’s and master’s degrees
Family: Wife, Maureen; daughters, Maura, 18, Keelien, 17; son, Connor, 8
Hobbies: Cooking, swimming in waves and collecting brightly colored Mexican folk art known as Alebrije
Car: 2015 Cadillac CTS
Read this story on Detroit Free Press.