Sarah Hadskey is an Architect and lifelong Architecture Junkie that is celebrating the 20th anniversary of her design firm, SAM studio. Sarah is a graduate of the LSU School of Architecture in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. LSU turned out to be a great choice, because it allowed the exploration of regional building types, landscape design, context, food culture, and encouraged travel, too.
Trying on different hats in the profession, Sarah worked at firms of different scales and types from her first job at a sole proprietor in Baton Rouge doing renovations for churches, homes, and college sports stadiums, an A/E firm that planned City Parks in the New Orleans area, then to mid-size Fleming Associates in Memphis, and lastly the larger firm HBG in the hospitality/casino Entertainment Studio before starting her own business. Working regionally from Louisiana up to Illinois also allowed her to learn more methods of design along with site and building water management.
Over the years, SAM studio has evolved into a highly client centered boutique architecture firm that collaborates closely between building owners, facilities departments, and end users to make their buildings more responsive to user needs and easier to maintain. Sarah often does renovation work in buildings that are 50 years of age or older resolving technical challenges and systems upgrades. She is always trying to integrate travel experiences, landscape strategies, and resilient building practices in her designs while remaining in context with local building history and environs.
LEED Accredited in 2006, she was a founding member of the Memphis Regional USGBC chapter, and its President in 2007. For the last decade, Sarah enjoyed serving regularly on the Architectural Jury at the University of Memphis for the upper level and graduate students in Comprehensive Studio.
Current projects-on-the boards are exciting: Exterior Improvement Grant projects for the Downtown Memphis Commission and their neighborhood clients that will bring joy to their immediate surroundings. It is a pleasure to get to know so many new people and help them dream bigger to refurbish family treasures. These projects also are enhance view corridors and landscape context in the City of Memphis.
Personal Bio:
Moving a lot as a kid, Sarah has lived in seven states, including Tennessee. She loves to travel while being anchored at a “home base” in Memphis now for 27 years. Growing up in many locations allowed a variety of interests to develop: in Florida, it was very easy to go boating whether by canoe, speedboat, or sailboat. Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida, and especially Ohio let her explore the world of horseback riding. Learning to jump horses in high school came in handy when she moved to New Orleans and then Memphis—it was not long before she found a horse of her own. Foxhunting and trail riding in the Memphis region held her interest for the next decade.
In a bid to hold her growing architecture practice and retire her first horse, Sarah and Glynn Hadskey moved from the University of Memphis area and bought Fat Pony Farm. Unknowingly, they bought a tick problem and 10 acres of solid invasive species. Sarah applied everything she knew about architectural project research and her background to the problem. After about a year of research, she implemented a program of invasive species eradication and native species encouragement on Fat Pony Farm. It has been a ringing success in tick reduction, and improves water management goals yearly. Upon arrival, things would flood with 6 inches of rain. Now it takes 14” of rain—and Sarah is shooting for absorbing 25” because of climate change. Strategies include soil improvement, extensive native plantings, and regrading.
Native planting and invasive species eradication also had a radical positive effect on the wildlife and ecosystem, much of which is chronicled since 2008 on the Facebook page for Fat Pony Farm. The most notable difference is that the property went from being utterly silent to now noisy with birds, frogs, and insects. The Eastern Box Turtle is a threatened species and has been doing well with the changes—there are more every year. Sarah adds knowledge of invasive and native species in the Memphis area yearly, through various workshops and conferences in addition to research. In 2019, she took the West Tennessee Urban Forestry class and is now a certified Urban Forestry Advisor. Fat Pony Farm is a certified Tennessee Tree Sanctuary with the Tennessee Urban Forestry Council listing 73 species of native trees. It is also on the Homegrown National Park Map.
Managing the 16 acres of Fat Pony Farm and its citizens (wild and domestic) is a daily challenge. Residents currently include 2 horses, 1 pony, 6 barn cats, 2 indoor cats, 1 dog, 2 adults, a kid, and a BUNCH of native plants with nightly firefly jewelry.
Why I like CSI:
I like the local Memphis chapter of CSI because they are a friendly, diverse, and welcoming group. They have a focus on technical education and sometimes even hands on construction demonstrations, along with a robust social/networking component. The meetings are well run. My projects generally feature a technical problem that needs to be resolved for the client, so having a more technical “how things go together” focus on CEU’s is really valuable to me and my practice. Having time to really get to know different parts of the architecture industry is also helpful—building is a team sport and it takes many players to do it well. I love learning anything I can to smooth out project flow from casual conversations at regular events.