AMERICA’S BEST-IN-STATE Residential Architects

AMERICA’S BEST-IN-STATE
Residential Architects

Edited by Richard Olsen
September 17, 2025 at 10:00 AM

n this era of escalated building-materials costs combined with the uncertainty of global tariffs, evidence of a slowdown in the market for custom houses is mounting. The National Association of Home Builders recently noted a softer housing market on the whole, with a drop of 3.7 percent in single-family houses under construction compared to this time last year. Still, if you’ve attempted to hire a carpenter, a stonemason, a plumber, or an electrician lately, you’d likely shake your head at any notion of a substantive decline. Seemingly everyone in residential construction, remodels and additions is backed up—including our nation’s architects.

Which is why we at Forbes have engaged in 10 months of rigorous research to produce the following: our second national top-firms list, America’s Best-in-State Residential Architects, encompassing a total of 400 architecture practices from all 50 states plus the District of Columbia.

An expansion of the research-and-evaluations processes created to produce Forbes’Top Residential Architects 2025 list, our methodology for this list drilled even deeper into the unique circumstances—cultural, social, economic, political, lifestyle, and beyond—that shape the markets for the custom single-family house in each individual state. To that end, we also looked at state-specific architects’ licensure numbers, comparing those totals to that of the national total to determine the percentages that each state represents in the whole. This metric was used as a guide to determine state-by-state representation of the 400 firms in the custom single-family house segment. And the result follows, below: A collection of U.S. architects setting the high-bar mark of excellence—and the ones you can turn to for your residential design-and-construction needs, no matter where in the country you call home.