Janice Howard and Anne Sneed, the principals behind one of San Diego’s most successful and longest running interior architecture firms, are laughing and joking their way through an interview, strolling down memory lane and recounting a history of producing more than 12 million square feet of commercial space. But the voices of the Howard-Sneed Architecture and Design partners level when it comes to their assessment of the health of Downtown San Diego’s office market. Each clearly is worried that a stagnant office development environment is in danger of being shoved into the deep freeze by a hyperactive housing market, one that is snatching up prime blocks for high-rise condos.

“Downtown is so dynamic and important a place to have strong office and retail tenants,” says Howard. “We are missing opportunities and the market.”

Sneed fears that rather than Downtown developing into a “live/work” environment, it is becoming a “live/tour” place where the primary sources of new employment are tourism jobs that cater to visitors both outside and within San Diego County.

The proprietors of an 18-employee firm that will report $3 million in revenue this year, Howard and Sneed are keenly, and perhaps uniquely, tuned into the health of the commercial market. As their firm prepares to celebrate its 20th anniversary, the company is doing 80 percent of its business outside the 92101 ZIP code, nearly the exact reversal of what life was like in the firm’s first decade. “We seem to be promoting all the residential Downtown and doing nothing for commercial,” Howard says.

Still, the partners admit that even if such a program today sparked interest from a potential major tenant, the lack of new office construction would hinder recruitment.

“I don’t think we have the product to promote,” says Sneed, 42, a former marketing committee chair with the Downtown San Diego Partnership. “You can’t sell something you don’t have. How do you tell J.P. Morgan Chase if you come Downtown you will have all these great things but you don’t really have any space for them?”

“We can flirt with you about incentives and waste your time,” says Howard, 48.

The lack of new commercial space is a threat to residential values and a potential factor in increasing regional freeway congestion as commuters leave Centre City homes for jobs elsewhere. “The city has to realize they will have to provide jobs and office buildings Downtown or they will have reverse migration,” Howard says.

Their view is supported by Jason Hughes, a broker and principal with Irving Hughes. “Downtown is going to be in dire straits in the years to come,” Hughes says. “We have had such an imbalance of residential construction and no commercial construction.”

He also worries that as the Padres continue to develop East Village, most or all of what was supposed to be commercial will turn residential.

Hughes is especially frustrated because he has seen firsthand how the new residential projects can spark commercial interest in Downtown. “With an inventory basis that approaches 10 million square feet, there always is going to be space Downtown,” Hughes says. “But it is not good space. When we have clients that want to come down here, they look around at what is available and say, ‘gosh, this isn’t all that exciting.’”

With the City Council’s decision to strike a Cisterra Partners proposal for an office behind center field of the new ballpark in favor of a larger public park, and Catellus selling its office-approved sites for residential condos, the only significant project on the table is developer Rob Lankford’s 23-story, $150 million 655 West Broadway. Hughes, who has led the efforts to prelease the repeatedly delayed building, says even if Lankford breaks ground this year and the project is the success he expects, developers that follow will find many of the desirable blocks locked up by residential investors. Much of what’s left will be in secondary locations or have its view corridors blocked by condo towers. (Cisterra remains interested in the ballpark and may yet propose an office tower for right field.)

“Where in the world will the future office buildings go?” asks Hughes. “I think the Centre City Development Corp. ought to eliminate some of these blocks, to not allow residential development.”

It is possible that might happen with the Downtown Community Plan Update now in the works. A final draft proposal may be released later this month and should wind its way to the City Council for final review in spring 2004.

Hughes would like action sooner. “I think there needs to be some serious planning and policies put in place, either through CCDC or the City Council as the redevelopment agency,” he says. “Something needs to be done.”

The Howard-Sneed partners are concerned the political climate is not favorable for the type of changes Hughes advocates.

“That is where Anne and I are getting a little frustrated with city leadership,” says Howard. “We need a mayor with vision who will embrace the vision of Downtown for all San Diegans. We are very actively trying to persuade Peter Davis to run for mayor. I think he would be an excellent mayor to get San Diego through this really critical time and to enable San Diego to truly become a world class city.”

Howard says the vision carries over into architecture, where so far she sees lots to complain about in many of the condo towers. She hopes the Ballpark District development changes her opinion. “The new ballpark is such a significant architectural statement that I hope it challenges other projects surrounding it to be built with the same commitment to quality and architectural excellence.”

The Road To San Diego

Janice Howard was raised in Bethesda, Md. She went to undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Tennessee, earning a master’s in space planning. She was brought to San Diego in 1978 by Jain Malkin, the region’s leading medical space planner. After three years she joined Austin Hansen (now Austin Veum Robbins Parshalle) then in August of 1983 went solo, forming J. Howard & Associates. (The name was a play on J. David & Associates, then a high-flying investment firm that later was unmasked as one of San Diego’s most infamous scams.)

Howard’s first big break came when she landed a meeting with George Bullette, the senior vice president with Merrill Lynch in San Diego. Bullette was responsible for the brokerage’s new offices atop the spanking new, all-black Imperial Bank tower.

“In those days Merrill Lynch had a locations department in New York which offered a fairly standard series of choices for new offices including space planning, furniture, color, general design, etc,” recalls Bullette. “Because we had such a substantial build-out allowance, I decided that we would largely do the work on our own.”

In the interview, Bullette says Howard was able to overcome her lack of experience. “She also really listened to us and asked questions about our business,” he says. “I wanted an office that was functional but also had a sort of timeless tastefulness to it. I wanted it to be appealing to our customers and particularly to our brokers because I felt it would be helpful in retaining them and in future recruiting. Janice grasped this immediately and began to make suggestions that seemed on target. As I recall, she even spent time with several of my managers without being asked to do so, and perhaps even without my knowledge, before she was hired. At that stage of my career, I had hired many hundreds of brokers and Janice strongly reminded me of some of those that lacked experience when I had hired them but had turned out to be among the best. She had talent and creativity and she also had people skills and enormous motivation. I hired her, realizing that we were taking considerable risk because of her lack of experience but feeling that she had what it took to make the project work.

“As it turned out, she gave her heart and soul to the project,” he says. “She interviewed about 100 employees in that one office and learned about their jobs and what they considered important in the new office. She synthesized that information and brought it back to me and my managers. The final product exceeded our expectations and was regarded as a showcase among Merrill Lynch offices for many years thereafter.”

Howard travelled to New York with Bullette where she was introduced to his bosses. Today, when describing what happened when Bullette’s bosses asked him about how long his designer had been in business, Howard mumbles and whispers, “four months.”

The company suggested Bullette change his mind.

“He stuck to his guns,” Howard says. “I don’t know why to this day. We did a great job for him. The space still is there and looks pretty much the same. We did several offices for Merrill Lynch after that.”

Meet The Partner

Four years later Anne Sneed joined the firm, becoming a partner in 1992.

Sneed was born in New Orleans and earned a degree in architecture from Louisiana State University. She was doing office interior work in Houston when the area’s economy went through what folks there described as a lull but was more of a severe recession.

Within five years, Sneed became a partner and the firm’s name was changed to Howard-Sneed. Her first big client with the firm was AT&T during construction of its space in the then-new Symphony Towers.

The two don’t spend every weekend barbecuing at each other’s homes. Howard lives in Coronado with her husband, Richard McElroy, and Sneed in Del Mar with her husband, Jim. Yet they work together like good friends and covered easily for each other over an eight-year period that saw the birth of three children to Sneed and two to Howard. The babies, now ages 5 to 13, came almost 18 months apart, a fact that Howard now jokes was planned.

“We really respect each other and like each other,” says Sneed.

“I don’t think there is anything fundamentally we have disagreed on,” says Howard.

While their accountant keeps insisting the two conduct regular meetings to talk business, the pair have chosen a more informal route. Most lunches are spent sitting in one or the other’s office and each morning, the cell phone comes on as the commute begins following dropping the children off at school.

The pair also have become devotees of the wireless BlackBerry. Especially Sneed. “My kids laugh at me,” she says. “They call it the crackberry.”

Client Tales

The firm has redesigned the same space for several different tenants. One of Howard-Sneed’s most enduring projects, the 1988 design of a corporate headquarters for the Henley Group took place in an architecturally distinctive building on North Torrey Pines Road across from the golf course. After the initial expensive project was complete, the company decided to move to the East Coast, never occupying the space. The building was sold to Jenny Craig International, which had Howard-Sneed do a redesign. It was then sold to American Residential Mortgage, which called again on the firm’s design expertise, as did Chase Manhattan Mortgage Corp., which got the offices as part of its purchase of American Residential. Howard jokes that, “this one project has spanned three marriages, one divorce and the birth of five kids.”

Along with the clients, Howard-Sneed gets high marks from the subcontractors that have to execute its designs. Sneed, who is the on-site person for the firm, gets special praise from Ruth Brown, the senior estimator in construction services for Dynalectric. “She is definitely hands-on with regards to the subtrades and how those trades integrate with her design,” Brown says. “That’s a big deal.”

Howard-Sneed is an official woman-owned business. But the pair says the male sound of the name has made for great fun, whether it was office visitors puzzling over the portrait of a male in the lobby (it was art) or a salesman trying to bluff his way through to the boss.

“We always get phone calls for Mr. Howard Sneed,” Howard says. “The one that always is a classic is ‘Hi, I’m calling for Howard. I sat next to him on an airplane the other day. That Howard, he is a great guy.’”

Law firms, more than 30 of them, have helped make Howard-Sneed.

A partial list of legal clients includes Baker & McKenzie; Jennings, Engstrand & Henrickson; McDermott, Will & Emery; Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach; Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro; Procopio Cory Hargreaves & Savitch; Seltzer Caplan Wilkins & McMahon; Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton; and Thorsnes, Bartolotta, McGuire & Padilla.

The most recent large project completed was 125,000 square feet for Cooley Godward in Sunroad Corporate Center in University City. (The cover photo was taken in Cooley’s offices.)

Lisa E. St. John, the Cooley director of administration who oversaw much of the work, says the choice of Howard-Sneed became obvious during the selection process. “With regard to the finished product, virtually every one of our partners and employees, as well as our clients, agree that our new offices are absolutely stunning,” says St. John.

Howard-Sneed is hardly without local competition. Some of the firms it competes with are Jossy+Carrier Design Group where principal Roi Jossy is a former Howard-Sneed employee, Smith Consulting Architects, Architects Delawie Wilkes Rodrigues Barker, Tucker Sadler Noble Castro Architects and Ir2 Interior Resources. Carrier Johnson is always tough. Howard says the full-service architecture firms are becoming tougher competitors as they bid very competitively in order to maintain a revenue stream.

Designing Women — Not

The partners shy away from the term “interior designers” and prefer “interior architects.” Don’t even joke with them about “Designing Women” labels.

“We are really an architecture firm,” says Sneed. “What we have chosen to specialize in is interior architecture. We help our clients develop how much square footage they need and what would be the most appropriate configuration. It is very soup to nuts. We figure out who they are, what they really need and then design it.”

Often the firm is brought on as part of the relocation team, as is the case with Latham & Watkins’ move to One America Plaza from the Merrill Lynch Building. The 72,000-square-foot project for the law firm is on floors 16 to 19 and is a complete remodel of space that the firm years earlier designed for Milberg Weiss. Of course, working at One America is nothing new for the firm; it was the overall space planner for the tower when it opened more than a decade ago.

All those years around real estate helped the pair develop some shrewd instincts.

In 1994, the firm began leasing a two-story, 7,500-square-foot building at 833 Kettner Blvd. The landlord was Anne Taubman, one of Seaport Village’s owners. Over the years, when the three women would meet for a lunch, ownership of the building would be discussed.

“Over lunch we would write our price on a cocktail napkin,” says Howard. “She (Taubman) would laugh and push the cocktail napkin back. One year (1997) the napkin went across and she agreed to the price.”

Now it is the partners’ turn to see the napkin, as residential developers interested in their property nose around. Howard says a good offer has yet to be made. Maybe if it happens, a new residential project will open where an interior architecture office really belongs.