HEIMA (Hey Ma!) is an architecture and design practice centered on small, high-craft projects across the Northeast with a focus on developing rich and varied personal experiences through considered materiality and an understanding of a project’s place and time. Our practice is founded in depth of engagement: with our clients’ lives, with their sites, with the materials that come to shape their spaces and with the processes by which those spaces are built. The practice is made up of a rotating cast of supporting talents, each of whom brings a unique skillset to select projects in support of principal Allen Pierce’s core competencies.

Heima is an Icelandic word that carries a great deal of meaning for us. Heima translates to English as “at home”. On its face it is an adverb of place, describing the site of an action. But ‘at home’ also represents a quality of fitting; of emplacedness; of aptness. We believe that aptness is the highest virtue that a design can exhibit: to aptly perform its intended functions; to fit its location in space and time; to deploy its constituent material parts appropriately; to employ its generative acts of labor fittingly; to make its users, its inhabitants feel that they belong with or within it. It is our goal that our projects be at home in their contexts and that our clients be at home with what we make together. In order to accomplish this, we take a holistic look at all that goes into a project from site selection through furnishings and forward into contingencies and plans for later alterations, growth and evolution.

Contact
hello@heima.studio
+1.267.225.2092
@heimaarch
Fishtown, Philadelphia