Our story. Our story.
Home is inside us — the place where we find everything that is true. Home is inside us — the place where we find everything that is true.
Home is the place that mirrors our hearts. Your physical environment keeps you in full awareness of where you are. If you can find your way to live in the house within you, then you not only create an enormous and broad offering to yourself, but also to those you love. Always responsive and receptive, we find sanctuary in a place that mirrors our soul. The best house is the house that looks like how we feel inside.
Celebrating over 40 years in business, we are a hands-on design enterprise devoted to our clients, one that nurtures and trains talent while creating the most beautiful houses in the world. We design in a diverse array of traditional styles and regional vernaculars for clients coast to coast. Our firm embraces a brilliant and eclectic family of architects and interior designers in our offices in New York, Nashville, Atlanta, Montgomery, and Palm Beach. Our designs include hundreds of residences, restaurants, private chapels, follies in a public park, hotels, a school, a rehabilitated town, and a family compound on a private island in the Caribbean.
McAlpine enjoys expansive reach while honoring its treasured southern parentage.
"I Know a Place."
A poem by Bobby McAlpine
Sometimes when I am lost
I fall into a kind of trance
and as if sleepwalking
find myself unconsciously
falling toward a place
known by few though by some.
Its architecture begins long
before I get there, for it
transcends the physical.
Though I go alone, I always
carry some one with me
perhaps an imaginary friend
and wear a silent, contained
smile as if to say,
"I know a place."
It was conceived by no
grown up but by a
dearer creature and
was designed to vail the
brashness that lay outside it.
It has no exterior though
it has a lovely face for
those who might not
understand and an almost
apologetic one for those
who do. It is built of
compassion and so, made to endure.
Anything new to enter
is quick to have a healthy
coating of life rubbed
over it to cloak and protect
it from any one occurrence
that might make itself known
and appear forever too
important.
It is here I am safe
and here I am clever
and here I am known
and here I cannot stay
too long.
I know a place
whose beauty is incidental
for it is more a piece of
understanding and in
every morsel a lesson in
survival, and it will last.
I know a place
that is infinitely complex
and at once simple.
It knows more than me
for it leaves me clues.
And in its fog there is
familiarity and clarity.
I have always known it.
I know a place
and it is you.
Why we build. Why we build.
We do have the power to create our own environment — and our environment, in turn, shapes us. We do have the power to create our own environment — and our environment, in turn, shapes us.
Dreaming together, drawing together, building together, we connect what lies within our hearts to what surrounds it. A certain spirituality, emotion, and mood is always present, like an undercurrent. We hear this and understand what is required, even if it is for a need not known. We know what house will be both diagnosis and cure.
Home is inside us – the place where we find everything that is true. We live now in the physical world, but our task is to walk in awareness of this inner place – to make manifest, in this world, evidence of another. In the land of brick and mortar we should always strive and struggle toward the likeness of our deepest understandings. We should seek that place that helps us to remember, or at least not to forget so quickly, the fleeting glimpses of truth that comes to us from within. The vulnerable beauty of this world fades to reveal its invulnerable source. I choose life, knowing it will perish. I choose love, knowing it may not last. This is why I love stone and steel and wood and thatch. Together, they are a marriage of the permanent and the perishable. There is a tender realism in their choice.
For many of us, the quest for home carries us through exhaustive search and compromise. Those who are highly attuned rarely succeed in bending the soul of a house they did not build to their will. A heart that is developed craves evidence of itself and the subtleties it has discovered. I dreamed of walking in the beauty and reality of my own mind. I had no place I recognized. This, in a nutshell, is why we build. When we finally find sanctuary in a physical edifice that mirrors our soul, it is ground gained and won – a flag on the moon of the heart.