Jenny Ni Zhan, 34
Director of development at Bromley Companies
After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture, and working at Rem Koolhaas’s OMA, Jenny Ni Zhan decided to switch gears and work in development instead. She feels she gets more control over the finished project working for a developer, and she gets to be more involved in the big decisions that shape how a building looks, feels and functions.
“I’ve always been interested in design, it’s a wide-open category,” she said. “Designing for that space, the space we live in — working for an architecture firm is focused on that space-designing aspect. I realized if you want to make more impact, to have exposure throughout the development process,” working for a developer can make more sense, she said.
In her current role at Bromley Companies, she’s gotten to work on a sprawling, 1.8 million-square-foot residential and commercial project in Tampa called Midtown Square, as well as developments closer to home, such as Microsoft’s New York City offices at 122 Fifth Avenue. She helps select contractors and architects, fine-tune designs, oversee construction, manage budgets, ensure contractors get paid, and generally tries to push projects over the finish line.
“It’s really a jack-of-all-trades position,” she explained, adding that her role also involves “accessorizing the building once it’s open, choosing art, delivering the whole thing.”
Before starting at Bromley in 2020, Zhan worked on Youngwoo’s colorful uptown Manhattan stack of blocks — the Radio Hotel — as well as Toll Brothers’ 121 East 22nd Street. She came to work on Toll Brothers’ Gramercy condo tower during her two-year tenure with the building’s lesser-known co-developer, a Los Angeles-based residential firm called Gemdale USA.
Zhan, who is originally from Beijing and Singapore, first moved to the U.S. in 2007 to earn her bachelor’s at Rice University. After finishing that degree, she did a brief stint designing buildings for OMA in Hong Kong before opting to return to the U.S. to earn her architecture master’s at Harvard.
