DeArmond, Ashmead & Bickley

Who is DeArmond, Ashmead & Bickley?

DeArmond, Ashmead & Bickley was an early-20th-century architecture and landscape architecture firm based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It specialized in Colonial Revival, Beaux-Arts, and English Arts & Crafts-style buildings, especially suburban houses.

Clarence DeArmond was a 1903 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. He worked under Frank Miles Day, and formed a 1908 partnership with Duffield Ashmead, Jr.. Ashmead was a 1906 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, who had studied under Paul Cret, and worked under Wilson Eyre. In 1911, the duo brought in a third partner, George H. Bickley, a 1903 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a 1907 graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts, who worked under Horace Trumbauer.

One of the firm's notable commissions was for alterations to "Fairwold," an 1888 Shingle-style summer house in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, designed by Wilson Eyre for T. Craig Heberton. In 1916, second owner Richard M. Cadwalader, Jr. hired D, A & B to face the shingled walls with stone, and expand the house into a Tudor-revival mansion. Eyre's understated Arts & Crafts interiors were replaced by literalist period-revival set pieces. Six years later, D, A & B added a massive music-room/solarium addition, that was larger than the original house. The building is now Or Hadash Synagogue.