Since 1889, CSHQA has grown from a single Boise office to a practice with licensed professionals to meet our clients’ needs across the nation — with the experience to anticipate what each market needs before it asks. Every project starts with the same question: what does this building need to do for the community and the people who use it every day?
That question drives everything — the design goals we set with clients at the start, the narratives our teams build around each project, and the spatial, lighting, and materiality decisions that determine how a finished building feels to the people inside it. Design leadership is a process that begins before the first drawing.
Design that Starts with Listening
Each project opens with a shared conversation: the client’s goals, the standards the project must meet, and how the end user should feel when they walk in.
At the Fresno Yosemite International Airport, that conversation shaped an expansion that kept revenue flowing and passengers moving through construction with zero operational disruption — while integrating public art that reflects the Central San Joaquin Valley’s people, geology, and agriculture. At Hotel Renegade in downtown Boise, it produced an eight-story boutique hotel where brick, leather, copper, and natural steel translate a client vision — rustic meets refined, old-world charm with a modern edge — into 122 guest rooms, a rooftop ballroom, and a cupola tower that now marks the Boise skyline. At the Idaho State Capitol restoration, it meant honoring a building that belongs to every Idahoan — preserving its historic fabric while bringing it fully into the twenty-first century.
The design prompt changes with every project. The discipline behind it doesn’t.
Integrated Design Services
CSHQA delivers architecture across the full project lifecycle: master planning and entitlements, programming, design, bidding, and construction administration. Depending on the project scope, MEP and civil engineering, interior design, and landscape architecture are provided through CSHQA’s in-house teams or trusted external partners — coordinated from the start to ensure consistent communication and well-integrated documents.
Built to Last, Designed for Now
Materials change. Technologies change. What doesn’t change is the discipline of balancing what’s beautiful with what’s practical, what’s current with what will endure.
From William S. Campbell’s design of the historic Idanha Hotel in 1901 — built in French Chateau style with local brick and native Idaho granite — to the CSHQA Boise office, at the time the largest commercial building in Idaho using both radiant heating and cooling, with twenty-seven LED fixture types installed, tested, and evaluated in a single facility. That range is what 135 years of practice looks like.
