Montgomery St. Peter, 30
Senior project designer at Vocon
Coming of age amid Detroit’s hollowed-out office and industrial buildings, Montgomery St. Peter knew early on that he wanted to be involved in figuring out how to repurpose commercial spaces. “Growing up in Detroit, when you’d go to the downtown center, the skyscrapers were empty without any windows in them,” St. Peter said. “I was fascinated by these skyscrapers and the materials. Instead of going into architecture and thinking about repurposing buildings, the best way I could think of was to become an interior designer.”
While at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies, St. Peter ended up interning at Shinola, the manufacturer of watches and leather goods. Over the course of a year and a half, St. Peter helped design the retailer’s new factory and headquarters at his college’s building, a former General Motors research laboratory. Today, Shinola occupies 95,000 square feet at the property, a 760,000-square-foot behemoth that Albert Kahn originally designed in 1928.
St. Peter, meanwhile, ended up doing residential interior work with Mikel Welch Designs and Euroluxe Interiors before landing at Eastlake Studio, a commercial design firm in Chicago, in early 2017. After that, Gensler hired him, and he moved to New York City. Gensler gave St. Peter exposure to major corporate clients working on sprawling office projects, including AllianceBernstein’s new headquarters in Nashville, News Corp.’s headquarters at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, and a 57,000-square-foot office for entertainment law firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz at 28 Liberty Street. After three years at Gensler, St. Peter joined Vocon in March 2021.
These days, St. Peter is working on base building upgrades and a new office for Harbor Group International at 51 West 52nd Street. He’s also finishing up the buildout of a 100,000-square-foot office for a private equity firm on the top two floors of 50 Hudson Yards. The space features a large interconnecting stair next to reception and plenty of blue accents in keeping with the firm’s brand color. Ultimately, the undisclosed company liked St. Peter’s work enough to hire him, too, for a 40,000-square-foot office in Chicago and a 400,000-square-foot headquarters in Austin.
