High-Rise Rigor. Boutique Craft.

Built From the Inside Out

David's approach to residential and commercial architecture was shaped long before he entered a professional office. While putting himself through school working as a professional mover, he spent years inside hundreds of homes and apartments across multiple cities. He was always deconstructing what he saw. How does this family live in this footprint? What makes a space feel right to occupy? What makes it fail the people living in it?

That obsession with how buildings actually feel to live and work in still drives every custom home design and every development project he takes on.

After completing his studies, David joined Margittai Architects in Pittsburgh, a boutique white glove practice known for high touch residential renovations, historic preservation such as The Century Inn’s fire restoration, adaptive reuse, and small commercial work including restaurants, bars, and breweries such as Dancing Gnome’s original brewhouse. It was a small office where every team member touched every phase of every project, from initial client meetings through construction administration. Architecture was treated as craft. Hand sketching, beautiful technical drawings, and genuine design thinking were embedded in every decision.

From there David took a deliberate detour before pursuing large scale experience. He worked as a construction manager on a custom homebuilding team, simultaneously managing the active construction of eleven custom homes from foundation through finish. That experience, not observed but executed, gave him a field-level understanding of construction sequencing, contractor coordination, material performance, and the thousand small decisions that determine whether a finished home performs the way it was designed to.

Education: Two Regions, Two Architectural Philosophies

David began his university studies in Penn State’s engineering program before transferring to Kent State University, where he earned his undergraduate degree in Architectural Studies in 2011. Kent State's program was rooted in post-Bauhaus European modernism, learning to maximize limited daylight, manage water, and design for cold climate performance. He then pursued his Master of Architecture at the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2015, deliberately choosing a climate and culture that would challenge everything he had learned. Texas taught him to respond to heat, shade from relentless sun, manage thermal load, and design with regional vernacular in mind.

Both traditions actively inform his work across custom residential architecture in Buffalo and Pittsburgh and large scale development projects nationally.

He also earned a Construction Management minor while at Kent State, a deliberate choice to bridge the persistent gap between architect and contractor that undermines so many projects. David works in the field with contractors and subcontractors, making sure what gets designed actually gets built the way it was intended. This is rare among licensed architects and it is one of the primary reasons clients choose David Stumpf Architecture.

Large Scale High-Rise and Mixed-Use Experience

In 2018, David moved to Dallas specifically to gain high-rise and large scale mixed-use experience. At WDG Architecture, one of the country's leading multifamily and mixed-use design firms, he built a project portfolio that spans luxury residential towers, master planned districts, adaptive reuse, and hospitality.

As lead designer on the Loft at Midtown Tampa, a jewel box mixed-use office building in Tampa's emerging Midtown district, David led design and began construction documentation for the project. On the 20-story NOVEL Turtle Creek luxury residential tower in Dallas, developed by Crescent Communities in 2020 and sold to Goldrich Krest for $74.1 million dollars in 2023, David designed the entire facade system and coordinated directly with structural engineers, and designed the elevated pool deck coordinating with landscape architects. At Thanksgiving Tower in downtown Dallas, he served as staff architect on the adaptive reuse of floors 49 and 50, converting a former oil executive's private office into hotel space, completing interior design, construction documentation, and construction administration. That project, originally known as The Guild, now operates as Mint House at Santander Tower.

David led all schematic design and design development for West Bend, a proposed 14-story luxury residential tower in Fort Worth, Texas. He contributed design and individual building design work across 505 Riverfront, a 42-acre mixed-use district along the Trinity River in downtown Dallas developed by Trademark Property Company, including direct coordination with S9 Architecture on signature buildings within the master plan. He also contributed design work across The District in Katy, Texas, a 100-acre master-planned mixed-use development west of Houston, and contributed schematic design and space planning for the Equinox Hotel in Austin for The Related Companies.

Beyond the built and proposed work, David collaborated directly with the development teams of Mintwood Real Estate and Kairoi Residential on early-stage multifamily and mixed-use concepts in the Dallas and Frisco markets. Working alongside principals of national development firms on feasibility and schematic design gave David a firsthand understanding of how serious developers evaluate risk, make design decisions, and what they demand from their architect partners at every stage of a project.

This experience designing luxury residential towers, multifamily developments, mixed-use master plans, and adaptive reuse projects gives David Stumpf Architecture a technical foundation that most boutique architecture firms simply do not have.