PHOTO: Courtesy Peterson Cos.
Taylor O. Chess
President of development at Peterson Companies
Through friends and the area’s general ambiance, Taylor O. Chess brushed up against acting when he was living in Los Angeles’s Brentwood neighborhood while in college in late 1980s. The experience taught him a valuable lesson.
“I realized the faces are just the faces,” Chess said. “The producers, the directors, the financiers — they are the ones who are making the decisions. They are the ones calling all the shots. And it’s very much like in real estate development. The people you don’t hear about are the ones calling the shots.”
Chess took the lesson home with him to Northern Virginia, where he’d grown up in Fairfax County as the son of an attorney who had a side business developing tennis facilities. One of Chess’s closest friends was Jon Peterson, whose own father Milt built Peterson Companies into one of the D.C. region’s biggest developers. Chess joined Peterson (for the second time) 14 years ago. (Jon is now CEO.)
Peterson’s best-known project is National Harbor, a more than 300-acre project on the Washington waterfront with dozens of restaurants and stores, thousands of housing units and hundreds of thousands of square feet of Class A office. Peterson has also built the mixed-use Fairfax Corner, Downtown Silver Spring and Compass Creek projects, and it’s working on two 500-unit multifamily buildings in Loudoun County.
In the late 2010s the company got into developing — and selling the land for — data centers. Most recently, a Peterson-affiliated company proposed a 5.5 million-square-foot data center complex in Stafford County, Va., in April, and the necessary rezoning could come this fall.
In between that initial stint at Peterson and his current run, Chess was a top investment executive at Regency Centers for eight years. There he helped build 11 grocery-anchored shopping centers while acquiring dozens more. Peterson recruited him back, initially to tackle its retail, and then in 2015 to head its development.
This June, too, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin appointed Chess to the 17-member Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority board, which sets policy for and advises on the management of the region’s airports.
