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Clients who approach Emery McClure Architecture have problems, complicated problems. From a teenager’s room in a historic home that needs organization to a commissioned conceptual project on rebuilding New Orleans, the husband-and-wife architect duo of Ursula Emery McClure and Michael McClure likes to solve problems.

“We always try to answer ‘yes,’” Michael says. “When people bring us a problem, we say ‘yes.’ That’s what a designer is for.”

“The jobs are so complicated, but small, that maybe at your average firm it’s not a good business move to take,” Ursula says. “For us, it is because the business is based on a thought process more than an economic process.”

If you’ve bought homemade jam at Main Street Market or had a drink at Red Star Bar, you’ve enjoyed the result of their thought processes. Or maybe you’ve seen their work in Dwell or Southern Living magazines or at the Venice Biennale, the major international art exhibition.

Answering “yes” since 1996, the firm started in New York before the couple became Louisiana transplants three years later. They currently reside “south of Interstate 10” in the state, dividing time between Baton Rouge and Lafayette. She’s a professor at LSU, and he’s a professor at University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Balancing their roles as professors and professionals is key to the firm in both practice and philosophy. They hire students and recent graduates, write academically about architecture and squeeze clients in on top of university workloads.

“It makes us be very strategic in how we plan our business,” Ursula says. “We can’t overload to the point that our clients will suffer.”

Moreover, the couple makes sure their commitment to education does not suffer.

“We’re in a really unique position because as professors, our main job during the day is to support the profession and the state. The state pays us, basically, to produce professionals,” Michael says. “We find a way to be supportive of the profession while being a part of it at the same time.”

Professionally, the firm is most known for its Beauregard Town “640max House,” one of the couple’s first projects and former residence in Baton Rouge. Though the two admit the house has been a bit “overdone,” Michael does say it became the calling card for their firm and the idea behind the home resonates through their projects: making culture while preserving it.

Emery McClure Architects

BOXING IT UP: Designed to organize a teenager’s belongings, the McClures mapped, coded and built a drawer and cabinet storage system that worked around the room’s 1890s fixtures.

“Instead of choosing between things, we always try to combine them in some way: old and new,” he says.

At the 640max House, basic working functions of the shotgun duplex were retained while giving it a loft-like feel. Elements like exposed framing paired with walls made of center-pivot shutters allowed the house to feel open while playing with and adapting to definitions of public and private space.

For a renovation and build-out of a 1920s bungalow-style home on Olive Street, old and new fused in a pool kitchen, trellis and garage that each served multiple purposes. The pool kitchen is anchored by a traditional cooking fireplace placed at an angle to be visible from the main house while defining an exterior edge. [Bonus points for incorporating old with the fireplace as it is a copy of Magnolia Mound’s.] The cypress-and-steel pool kitchen serves as a kitchen, formal dining area and covered pool house. The stucco and wood trellis is a covered walkway to the pool kitchen and garage while differentiating the spaces and negotiating from the old style of the house to the modern backyard space. The cement-board garage can handle automobiles as well as art, which can hang from wires.

In the teenager’s room in the 1890s Blum House, semi-permanent organized accommodations needed to be made for the teenager’s accumulation of “stuff” while respecting and not damaging any original Victorian fixtures. The McClures mapped out all the girl’s possessions and their frequency of use, coding them by color and door shape. The categories of “dress, entertainment, school and horses” were subdivided and installed in drawers and cabinets that used three flipped and rotated door types. The installation itself was cut and notched to fit, leaving the original trim and fireplace intact.

A similar feat of organization and creation came in a 512 linear-foot book storage system to house a librarian’s collection that used a series of stacked boxes.

Emery McClure Architects

FIRE FIXTURE: The traditional plantation-style cooking fireplace in this Garden District backyard garage renovation and build-out is set at an angle to create visibility indoors and define outdoor boundaries.

“We could’ve added decoration onto that [the boxes], but the librarian didn’t care,” Michael says. “She cared about the books. It was about making the design go away so the books would pop out.”

Nokat (No Katrina, No Catastrophe, No Category), the conceptual project commissioned by the University of Texas at Austin, explores rebuilding New Orleans. The project furthers the High Density for Higher Ground design published in Terra Viscus as part of the 2006 Venice Biennale. NOkat looked at solutions to living with water, creating varieties of residential and commercial space that incorporated infrastructure like spillways and levees into the design while increasing wetlands.

A design like NOkat emphasizes the attitude and capacity at which Emery McClure can problem solve. The design is riddled with intricacies like permeable solar-screens, chinampa fields, canals and two-story streetscapes that create culture while employing effective traditional cultural precedents.

“Architecture now in a contemporary environment is as complex as an iPhone,” Ursula says. “That is contemporary life.”

“An iPhone is just like a porch,” Michael adds.

That’s just how Emery McClure Architecture functions: designing simple answers to complex problems.