Kevin Wilkes – Founder & Managing Partner at Princeton Design Guild

Mark Freda: Kevin, thanks for being here today.

Kevin Wilkes: Thanks for inviting me, Mark.

Mark Freda: It’s my pleasure. So what I’d like to do first is look at some of your community service. You used to be on the Princeton Borough Council at one point, right?

Kevin Wilkes: Yes. When we had a borough. I was on the terminal years of the Borough Council from 2008 till 2012, 13 when the consolidation vote took place. I was honored to be on the ticket with President Obama in 2008 as my first run for office.

Mark Freda: There you go. How cool. What does an elected official do? Tell us a little bit about that.

Kevin Wilkes: Well, I was lucky I thought. At that time in the borough, we had a very strong staff with Bob Bruschi and Engineers and Zoning Officer Derek and Chris Budzinski, and we actually did things to solve problems for issues in the borough. We worked on traffic and parking issues, which were a constant problem in the borough. We worked on emergency services problems. We had three fire volunteer departments back then, and there were many issues in trying to navigate their needs and requirements as the community grew and became more complex.

The biggest issue was the relationship with the university, and I felt very strongly at the time that the university needed to assist the community in many ways as possible given that the growth of Princeton I largely attribute to the growth of Princeton University. It was very rewarding for me to serve in the borough. I regret that as a young person during the Vietnam War era, I did not serve military service, but it wasn’t particularly appealing to go to the Vietnam War. So I look at my five years on Borough Council as a corollary, surrogate service to the community that I did not do as a young person in the military.

Mark Freda: I think serving as an elected official—and I don’t use the word politician, because to me a politician is one thing and an elected official is something else—but I think being an elected official at the local level, if your heart’s in the right place and you’re doing it for the right reasons, it’s one of the best things ever to do for anybody.

Kevin Wilkes: It was very rewarding. I was poor as a politician. I constantly battled with two of my colleagues on council over issues and I was probably unyielding at times when if I’d been a better politician, I would’ve just let it roll off my back, but I felt determined to solve problems correctly, whether it be the reconstruction of Harrison Street Park or whether it be the issue of the relocation of the dinky farther away from the center of town, to which I was opposed.

Mark Freda: Well, I could do a whole podcast on the dinky, but another group you’ve been involved in is Princeton Future. So what is that group? What’s the goal? What happens there?

Kevin Wilkes: Princeton Future is a group that I got involved with maybe 10 years before I ran for council. It’s a citizen advocacy group for planning improvements for the combined communities of Princeton Township and Princeton Borough. There was a very controversial project in the late 1990s, early 2000s about the relocation or reconstruction of the public library downtown. And there were strong lobbying forces in the community from the mayor of Princeton Township that the library move to Princeton Shopping Center, and there were equally strong forces in Princeton Borough that the library stay exactly where it was.

The initial design for relocating the library was not a terribly advanced piece of civic public space making; it sort of replaced the library where it was. And at that point, what’s now Hinds Plaza was a surface parking lot. They imagined they were gonna try to solve two problems at once and build the community parking garage, which the town had fought for 20 years. It was an impossible mountain to climb to create a municipal garage for this community. And they were gonna put it right there on top of the surface parking lot, which seems somehow logical to replace parking with parking, but it really didn’t advance the community design.

So a man named Robert Geddes, former dean at Princeton School of Architecture when I studied there, and Sheldon Sturgis and Robert Goheen, a former president of Princeton University, the three of them banded together and created a citizen’s advocacy group called Princeton Future specifically to lobby Borough Council and Marvin Reed, the mayor at the time, to change the proposed design to both keep the library downtown, but move the parking garage farther to the east and create a plaza as a significant public space that somehow replicated the success of Palmer Square at a different portion of the community. After the success of that they won. It was quite a battle.

After the success of that, the group felt emboldened and Princeton University actually participated with Princeton Future to look at other areas of the town that could be subject to planning improvements. I realize, as I’m sure you do, the planning departments of Princeton Borough and Princeton Township are not civic planning design organizations. They were the departments to which you submit your application and they review the application and go over a checklist and say everything’s here. What the town lacked was some vision to what the town could look like five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road. To anyone who walks in Hinds Plaza and enjoys Kristine’s or Witherspoon Grill or the library, I want you to realize, had it not been for this group, you would’ve been standing on the first floor of a parking garage.

Mark Freda: You got a good memory. That’s interesting. So I wanna bounce to another thing. You’ve done so many things, it’s really cool looking at your resume and seeing all that you’ve been involved in. But you led the charette for what became 400 Witherspoon Street, which became the Princeton Township Municipal Building. This is back in 1997. So that must have been another interesting process. Can you share a little bit about that?

Kevin Wilkes: It was actually my first arm wrestle with elected officials trying to convince them to do the right thing. I had colleagues with me, a landscape architect friend of mine, Alan Goodheart. At that time I had worked for Princeton Township as the building inspector from 1991 to 1994. So I knew the municipal staff, and I knew the Mayor Phyllis and the administrator Jim, and they were housed in the old school at the corner of Witherspoon and Valley and the Valley Road School. I had three cups on my desk in the building department: one was for my coffee, and the other two were to collect the drips from the leaks from the roof that came through onto my desk.

Time and again, people said, “Oh, we need to do something about the municipal building.” And the elected officials finally screwed up the courage to burden the community with a significant bond issue to build a new municipal building. Many people felt it was not necessary, we could just stay in the school. And they hired the firm that had just done the new municipal building at Ewing. And the elected officials, for understandable reason, thought, “Well, this firm does municipal buildings, let’s hire them.” Well, they did a terrible job. I urge anyone to go to the municipal building at Ewing now and thank the Lord that those people didn’t build our municipal building because it’s a mess.

So we tried to convince elected officials and finally succeeded. I said what we have so many great architects and designers in this community. Princeton is the center of the state’s architectural design community, which is extraordinary for a 30,000 population town. Actually the core of architecture participants in this state is right here in town, a little bit to do with the architecture school, a little bit to do with such a wonderful community to live in. So I said, look, let’s have a local competition and have people draw their own conclusions and that’s how we entitled the Charette: “Draw Your Own Conclusions.” I convinced them to put up prize money. We hired jurors who were professors at East Coast Architecture schools. Michelle, Steve Frack, Ross Denar, and Phyllis stuck their necks out because they’d already paid this firm to design this building and here was, “Oh, let’s start over.”

The process turned out great. We got wonderful designs. The winning design was by Kurt Shakin and Sharon KSS, who actually happened to practice right across the street from the site. Second place finishers were Richards and Smith Architects, the people who have been responsible for the new Triumph and the post office and McCaffrey’s books and really local talent rose up and showed what great skills and strength they had in this competition. We ended up with a beautiful building that to this day is a treasure to walk into. The staff loves working here, people like coming here and there’s ample space to grow and expand. Even although we couldn’t anticipate consolidation, it proved to be the building that was needed to use for the consolidated municipalities.

Mark Freda: Let me switch gears here a little bit. I believe you created Princeton Design Guild, or PDG as some people call it, around 1985. Big anniversary coming up, I guess. So tell us a little bit about that side of your life.

Kevin Wilkes: I graduated from Princeton Architecture School in 1983. I did my apprenticeship with an extraordinary solar architect in town, a man named Doug Kelbaugh, firm was Kelbaugh and Lee. When you start out as a young architect, you have to work under a licensed architect to learn the things they don’t teach you in architecture school. Architecture schools teach you high level theory, history, ideology, principles; working in an architect’s office, you learn all the little detail things.

As soon as I completed that two years later, I wanted to found my own firm because I always knew I wanted to build my own work. I grew up in Manhattan and I came to Princeton to go to college, and I knew all along I couldn’t really build my own work in Manhattan. But when I got out here and I saw the Princeton community was starting to change, it was the beginning of Princeton’s escalation from an interesting historic town to an amped up real estate value town, which meant there were tons of opportunities for residential construction and the first big building boom was 86, 87. So I founded my firm right at the beginning of that. As only established builders in town immediately became new home builders, the renovation market was left wide open. So I entered in 1985 doing design build work, doing kitchens. My first clients were Marsha and Elliot Freeman on Hemlock Circle. I did their kitchen in 1984. She still loves it to this very day, 40 years later.

Mark Freda: What’s the focus of PDG now?

Kevin Wilkes: We’ve grown in the 40 years and we now do much more than just residential work. Because of my experience, I’ve gained a lot more insight into commercial projects, into university related projects. So we actually have a foot in virtually all worlds now. We do commercial work in downtown. I do custom woodworking for Princeton University; I build replica doors for their historic gothic doors. We build those in our shop. I still do new homes. We basically use our skills. We have 20 employees. There are four of us on the professional design staff. The other 16 are crafts people who make things. So we’re fundamentally committed to making the things that we and some others design. Right now we just look for the most interesting project that’s intellectually challenging to keep our staff at the cutting edge of making beautiful things.

Mark Freda: I gotta jump to this one. I think a lot of people must be aware that you were very involved in the renovation of the former post office on Palmer Square into Triumph Princeton. That seemed to have been a pretty complex project. Can you share a little bit about that one?

Kevin Wilkes: It was the single most complicated thing we’ve ever done. I had two hats. I was hired by the owner, Adam Reitz, a wonderful man. He owns the Triumph Brewery Enterprise. He envisioned it on Nassau Street in 1996 in that spot that was the old bowling alley. He really wanted to create a signature project that would speak as highly of his enterprise as possible. The first thing he did was hire me to be his representative to manage the job. His managing staff, they know how to make beer and create a restaurant; they don’t know anything about building buildings.

My first entree was to represent him in the hiring of everyone from the architects to the builders. And then I asked him, “Listen, it could be a little conflict of interest, but I would like to be eligible for the millwork side of the project to do the woodworking, the restoration work in the old lobby and the new bars.” And he said, “Okay, sure.” So it turned out I did get that. I was on the front end wearing the owner’s ball cap and on the back end putting all the final details in right as we were opening the project.

The interesting thing there is we had four architects on that job. That’s how complex it was. The specialty needs were of an architect to do historic preservation. The federal government required, when Adam acquired the deed, that the entire exterior be restored and that the old lobby and the mural be restored; beyond those items, do whatever they want with the building. Then we needed another architect to figure out how to do all the other stuff—that was a design architect. Then we needed an architect to figure out all the technical systems because nothing of the post office would’ve been usable: heating a restaurant that had no cooling, the fluorescent lamps were inappropriate. So we had a third architect do the technical mechanical coordination of all the engineers. And then they had me coordinating all the architects along with the interior millwork stuff.

It took four years on site, and it took four years before that to get it approved through the town. So the planning board hearings were in 2017 and we opened in mid-2025. Tremendously lengthy project. We started demolition and construction right in the middle of COVID, which was actually a godsend because there was nobody downtown. I could line up five dumpsters out on Palmer Square East and sort out all the different things: the pipe and metal in one, and the plaster in another. We got through demolition, a thing that would’ve been tremendously impactful to downtown, while nobody was there. So it didn’t really speed things up, but we made it work for us and we got through that. There was a solid two years of core construction and then about 10 months of fine tuning at the end. It was like building and sailing one of those ginormous cruise ships; every different need you could imagine came to bear upon that project.

Mark Freda: It’s a pretty impressive project. People should stop by just to look at the final product.

Kevin Wilkes: Well, they should probably have a beer too and maybe get something to eat. It’s very respectful to the town. The history that everyone remembers about going into the lobby—in my case, I mailed my graduate school applications in there—all of that’s been restored. Every piece of the woodwork in that lobby is original except for a few replacement ones, and I challenge you to find them. The entire mural was restored by a high-powered New York City art conservation firm. It’s in great shape. We improved the lighting in that space. The beautiful chandeliers were original; we just cleaned them and changed the lamps. It’s a remarkable room.

Mark Freda: It’s hard to sit in there and have an excellent meal but to not just look around and say, “Oh my gosh, what a difference.”

Kevin Wilkes: It also speaks to the quality with which the federal government used to build buildings. It has something to do with low bidder mentality, but it also has to do with the lack of aspiration for greatness in civic design.

Mark Freda: You mentioned you grew up in Manhattan. Tell us just a little bit about where in Manhattan and what was that like?

Kevin Wilkes: I was actually born in Smyrna, Georgia in 1957. My father, who worked for Shell Oil for 40 years, was transferred from the Atlanta office to the head office in Manhattan in 1959. We lived on Riverside Drive in 88th Street. I had what I consider a charmed childhood growing up playing in Riverside Park in the 1960s when Manhattan was a profoundly safe place to be. My parents left Manhattan in 1972 as Manhattan started its decline and they moved to Westfield, New Jersey.

They gave me two choices: go to Westfield High School or keep going to the Trinity School where I was attending on the Upper West Side. I went one day to Westfield High School and it was larger than the entire population of Trinity School. I was completely overwhelmed and intimidated. So I did the commuter thing and I went to Manhattan every day and go to school for my last three years. The benefit of that was I spent three years commuting on the Central Jersey Railroad, and that taught me right away I did not want to lead the commuter lifestyle because it’s grinding and you’re not in control.

Luckily I was admitted to Princeton. Westfield to Princeton was a 40-minute ride back then. There were two lights from Somerville to Princeton. All my colleagues at Princeton wanted to go live in New York, and I came from New York and I’m like, “I don’t wanna go back to New York. I wanna stay right here in Princeton.” And that’s what I did.

Mark Freda: I think you were involved in theater for a while. What was that all about?

Kevin Wilkes: In those days I wanted to design and build things, but precious few people will let a 17-year-old design and build a building. So I did stage design. I was drawn towards the theater because I could design. My mother was an interior designer, my father was an engineer. Stage design was like no one really wanted to go build the sets and I thought, “Oh, I could do that.” Plus all the good-looking girls did theater and it was a way I could meet girls.

When I got to Princeton, I just kind of went hog wild and I did sets at Theatre Intime and sets for the Triangle Show in 1977 and worked on a wonderful enterprise Princeton used to have called PJ&B, Princeton Junction and Back. I ended up painting sets for McCarter all through the late seventies. But there was a point where I decided I was tired of having my design thrown in the dumpster after three weeks, and I really should get serious about my architecture education. I got serious about entering the architecture program at Princeton and pivoting away from theater.

But I urge any young person to go do that because there’s tremendous ability to learn resources and work with people. True creativity can happen in a room with eight other people.

Mark Freda: Lemme jump back to PDG for a minute. You’re local, but I think you’ve done projects in lots of places, not just in Princeton. Is that right?

Kevin Wilkes: This is true. When I was young, I would go anywhere to get a job. I’ve designed a townhouse in Manhattan, homes in Lake Kissimmee in Florida. Pretty much along the East Coast. But now, 40 years in, I pretty much don’t have to leave Princeton, Hopewell, or Montgomery. As the traffic has gotten ridiculous in Central New Jersey, there’s only so far I can go if I hope to keep a good crew and make some money.

Mark Freda: Out of all these different projects, do you have some favorites that stick out?

Kevin Wilkes: Without a doubt, the post office. However, there’s one underway that’s actually slightly more important socially to me, which is the restoration of Paul Robeson’s birthplace on the corner of Witherspoon and Green Street. Shirley Satterfield recruited me in 2007 to look at this. It was honestly a crazy pipe dream. From 2007 until now, 19 years later, we are within five or six months of actually finishing the completed project.

The decision was made to try to pivot because it’s a large building. We collectively came up with this idea of making it partial community center, partial residential, partial gallery that’ll tell the history of the neighborhood and the church and the Robeson family. We finally were able to start construction in the 2018-19 timeframe. It’s been difficult to raise the funds to do this because it’s not such an imageable project. Paul Robeson has been dead 50 years now and his reputation was besmirched with the communist smear tactics.

But he is a native son to Princeton. We’ve donated all of our architectural services and we’re just charging our actual labor cost to do the construction. Personally for me, it’s a project where I can invest my soul and get some peace out of seeing this building be able to live and tell the story for the next 150 years. It’s really a legacy project for our operation.

Mark Freda: Kevin, anything else coming up with PDG or your community things?

Kevin Wilkes: We’re about to embark on building a new building for the YWCA at the location of the old Bramwell house on Bayard Lane. The Y project I’m going to do with the team that I did the post office with, so it should really be a superlative project.

Mark Freda: Kevin, I want to thank you for joining us today.

Kevin Wilkes: A pleasure, thanks for inviting me.