Freese Architecture

America ByDESIGN

America ByDESIGN, the highly acclaimed television program that presents to the national audience a variety of the best and most forward-thinking architecture around America, will feature one of our prized homes we call Lakeview. It will air on a Saturday evening this coming July on CBS – the exact date to be determined – and will be a filmed tour led by our own Brian L. Freese!  The program is partnering with the American Institute of Architects to highlight notable homes and buildings in different regions in the country. In this episode, it will reveal inspiring homes in the Midwest region.

We’ll send a follow-up newsletter once the date is confirmed.

Stay tuned!

Freese Presents Midwest Modern to 2025 AIA Oklahoma Conference

Brian L. Freese recently gave a presentation entitled Midwest Modern – The Journey of Freese Architecture at the 2025 AIA Oklahoma Conference on Architecture with the theme of “Unchartered Horizons”. The presentation covered the firm’s history from its founding in January of 1994, to Freese’s primary influences of rural utilitarian structures, to the more notable published and awarded residential projects that illustrate the firm’s path and evolution from 2005 to the present.

We are honored to have presented to our peers some of our architectural work of which we are so proud, and that we hope have enriched the lives of our clients.

What Is Your Right Size?

There has been much written and lectured on “right-sizing” – for businesses, waist dimensions, and yes, even houses. In the design of a custom home, this question is always central to the discussion between new homeowners and their architect. There is no single right answer. And as it is for anything personal, the answer is different for everyone.

So, what is your “right-sized” home?

The answer lays in how you live – how you really live. Not how you think you want to live or aspire to live. This process takes a bit of soul-searching, reflection, and honest answers.

Your home should reflect how you truly live in your everyday life – your needs, your habits, your rituals, your locations of energy, and where and how you spend your quiet time. This last point, by the way, is perhaps one of the most important ones. This is the time in which we can be calmed, re-energized, and inspired. This is where we get the fuel to get through so much of what we do day-to-day. Even this space should be carefully calibrated to its occupants and their quiet time rituals.

An interior designer friend and collaborator of mine has recommended to her clients the “95% rule” – designing a home according to how owners spend 95% of their time. I thought this was brilliant, and I have shamelessly stolen her concise statement and used it often with my clients.

The best homes fit their owners like a custom-tailored suit – not too much fabric in some places (waste of money), not too tight in other places (annoying!) – feeling perfectly natural and perfectly sized so that it’s a consistently pleasant experience. No excesses and no pinch points. Your home should feel the same way.

A right-sized home just feels right to its owners. One test and measure is whether the homeowners go about their day in their home without any sense of obstructions for which they have made forced compromises – awkward paths through cramped spaces, backing up for a wrong-swinging door, or mentally preparing for knee-aching steps where there shouldn’t be any (mostly an over-60’s issue). The list is long. But none of these annoyances happen in a well-designed custom home.

Imagine you are going about your daily functions in your home, or even in that favorite spot you have reserved for quiet time, and you become conscious of how you feel in that moment. Imagine a feeling of contentment, of balance, of calm, of rightness in that moment. Beyond all the necessary and important functions a home provides, it is this experience that the best custom homes give to their owners.

This is what we do.

NEW VIEW – Twenty Magnificent Homes by Midwest Architects

Freese Architecture is delighted to be featured in yet another nationally distributed coffee table magazine! The book is called NEW VIEW – 20 Magnificent Homes by Midwest Architects, published by the recognized Florida-based  Benton Buckley [...]

Oklahoma Magazine – Best of the Best for 16 Years Running!

Well, we couldn’t be more thrilled! Sixteen years running to be selected as one of the state’s top residential architects is truly an honor. We feel like we’re getting the hang of it!

Oklahoma Magazine – Best of the Best

The readers of OK Magazine have honored us once again, and for 15 years now! Thank you!

Midwest Modern – Freese Architecture marks 30 years with intended connections to nature

Yes, it’s been 30 years for Freese Architecture! It’s been a blur with a lot of battle scars received, memorable moments catalogued, and a few hard-won successes earned. The Tulsa World wrote an extensive piece with recollections, comments, and thoughts for the future by founder Brian L. Freese, AIA. We’re still focused on designing the best possible Midwest Modern homes and buildings for our clients!

House Plans for Sale!

There are some advantages to being in business for a few decades. We’ve amassed a deep catalog of beautiful modern home designs we can now offer for sale! Interested in seeing some of our plans? Give us a call and we can show you some pretty wonderful homes.

HOL Features Freese Architecture

HIGH ON LIVING, a coffee table book series focusing on all elements of design in the built environment throughout the world, has now featured Freese Architecture in a second of their beautifully curated hard cover [...]

AD Splash

As earlier reported in our website blogs, Architectural Digest, or AD, the premier magazine on design and architecture worldwide, selected Freese Architecture in their AD March 2023 issue as the state’s most recognized custom residential architectural firm! Their ongoing program of an annual issue featuring a different state and its most acknowledged design professionals led them to our (digital) front door when they featured our beautiful state in that issue.  To our surprise, they called again! We were featured in their AD January 2024 issue along with a short list of other design firms. Maybe they’re finally discovering what Oklahomans have known for a long time – there’s some serious talent in our state!

Lakeside Garners Design Awards

Lakeside, an end-to-end remodel of a humdrum 1960’s ranch style home overlooking a private neighborhood lake, was given two design awards in the 2023 AIA Oklahoma Excellence in Design Awards program! Lakeside earned a Merit [...]

Oklahoma Magazine – Best of the Best

We always appreciate the recognition received from the readers of Oklahoma Magazine in its annual Best of the Best issue – 16 years running now! Freese Architecture continues to strive to design homes and buildings that are fitting to their locales and, most importantly, provide joy and inspiration to our clients!

Architectural Digest – Belonging to the Heartland

Architectural Digest, the premier magazine on design and architecture worldwide, recently selected Freese Architecture as the state’s most recognized custom residential architectural firm! Their ongoing program focusing on a different state and its most acknowledged design professionals for their various issues led them to our (digital) front door when they featured our beautiful state in their March 2023 issue.  We appreciate the recognition, and love that we’re finally in the pages of this esteemed publication!

High on Living Dream Homes

HIGH ON…LIVING, a book series focusing on all elements of design in the built environment, featured Freese Architecture in its beautiful book called Dream Homes, published in 2022. The HIGH ON…LIVING books, produced and distributed [...]

Unbuilt But Not Unloved

Like all architects, we are proud of our portfolio of built projects, honed with many months of intense scrutiny, careful sculpting, design critiques, editing, and the all-important client input. However, all design professionals have a deep, unseen portfolio of unbuilt works having gone through the same level of deep consideration. We are also very proud of our unbuilt designs, and still refer to them as if they were built.

We call this unbuilt home Casa de Luz, designed for a family of five. The home’s design is our recipe of Midwest Modern with the added spice of modern Mexican architecture. This special ingredient was inspired by the wife’s Mexican birthplace and her architect father’s lifelong influence on her aesthetic tastes. A central 60-foot-wide glass wall opens to the expansive views of the property’s greatest asset – a heavily treed front yard with undulating terrain and a dry creek bed running the entirety of the 250-foot-wide lot. When the Oklahoma rain bears down, the creek bed transforms into a deep, fast-flowing ribbon of water kinked by large rock outcroppings.  The glass wall is enclosed within an extruded stucco frame that offers a deep protective cover to the central outdoor space. Flanking stone blocks carved out for fenestration bookend the dramatic center stucco frame.

Many of our unbuilt projects inform our later designs that were ultimately built. They can expand our repertoire of creative solutions – our “bag of tricks” – so that no good ideas go to waste. Although some of our projects are unbuilt, they are never forgotten!

Oklahoma Magazine Best of the Best For 15 Years!

THANK YOU, friends and readers of Oklahoma Magazine – over 100,000 strong – for once again selecting Freese Architecture as one of the Best of the Best Residential Architects in Oklahoma. We are honored and flattered to be included among the most talented in our state and always motivated to put forward our best work!

Victor Featured in Western Art & Architecture Magazine

We are very excited that one of our favorite Tulsa homes was featured in the 2022 June/July issue of Western Art & Architecture magazine, the nation’s premier lifestyle publication covering art, architecture, and design west [...]

Freese Architecture Brings the Hardware!

We are honored to have received two 2021 AIA Eastern Oklahoma Excellence in Design awards and one 2021 AIA Oklahoma Excellence in Design Award (state-level) last year. At the Eastern Oklahoma level, there were 39 [...]

Oklahoma Magazine – Best of the Best

We always enjoy getting double duty in a publication In the July 2021 issue of Oklahoma Magazine, we were named one of the state’s Best of the Best Residential Architects, which is now 14 years [...]

Oklahoma Magazine – Life & Style

Oklahoma Magazine featured in its December 2020 issue one of our recently completed homes of which we are particularly proud! Located in the Midtown area of Tulsa, Victor has the enigmatic presence of a modern [...]

Tulsa World – The Bridge to the past

One of our current projects “on the boards”, the Bridge, was featured in the Tulsa World in their August 29, 2020 newspaper. The expectations are high that this development will be a game-changer for the area, and we agree!

Pearl District Development Strikes Gold

The Golden Pawn II building at 13th and Peoria in Tulsa, a historied haunt for local and visiting musicians in the market for musical instruments and equipment, is readying for a total restoration and repurposing. [...]

Tree House in The City

Do you remember as a child the thrill of being in a tree house? Everything from climbing the rickety ladder rungs, to ducking under and around the boughs, to stepping onto the platform at a [...]

To Design With Nature

News flash: The entire world is now entangled in the tentacles of a viral pandemic. You’ve probably heard. Beyond my own predictable (and relatively insignificant) frustrations with being shuttered at home and having more time [...]

Aw-Shucks, it’s Just a Napkin Sketch …

In an effort to distract its members from the unpleasantries we have all been enduring these past few months, the Eastern Oklahoma AIA held a member-only napkin sketch competition. The rules were pretty loose – [...]

13 Years Running as OK Mag’s Best of The Best

Freese Architecture has been selected for the 13th consecutive year as one of Oklahoma Magazine’s Best of the Best Residential Architects. Its readership of over 100,000 Oklahomans throughout the state voted again for our firm. [...]

Prairie Pavilions Nationally Featured

Prairie Pavilions Featured in Western Art & Architecture Magazine Western Art & Architecture magazine, the preeminent publication covering art, architecture, and design west of the Mississippi River, featured our Prairie Pavilions home in Joplin, Missouri, in [...]

AIA Oklahoma Design Award 2019

Our MM31 home was honored with a Citation Award at the AIA Oklahoma Design Excellence Awards Banquet on Nov. 1, held on the top floor of the Devon Tower in Oklahoma City. This Freese Architecture [...]

How Architecture Inspires

Our experiences that are most significant, that actually define our lives, are but a series of moments. Whether joyous, momentous, embarrassing, or even painful – brief episodes become markers of our own personal story. A [...]

Pearl District Gets a New Neighbor

We love a worthy challenge, and one of our favorites is taking on a dismal, uninspired building to transform into great architecture. A two story, pre-engineered, metal warehouse in Tulsa’s Pearl District, 410 S Peoria, [...]

MM38 – Next In Our Midwest Modern Series

Freese Architecture is once again partnering with Austin Lee, LLC on the second in our series of Midwest Modern homes, called MM38, now under construction at 3031 East 38th Place in Tulsa. This home, like [...]

Dramatic Lakeside Home Featured in Oklahoma Magazine

We are pleased to have Oklahoma Magazine feature our recently completed project in their July 2019 issue.  Located at 2830 South Gary, in Tulsa, Lakeside consisted of a substantial remodel and additions to a rather [...]

Commercial Project Refreshes a Tired Metal Building

Freese Architecture’s next commercial project is bringing new life to an east Tulsa industrial area. The new facility is being designed for Bevins Company, which manufactures and distributes safety equipment worldwide for high-line power workers. [...]

MM31 Attracts Local, National Attention

When our team designed MM31, code for Midwest Modern on 31st Place in Tulsa, we knew the home’s sculptural quality made it something special. Others agree. The residence now is garnering local and national praise. [...]

Joplin House Featured in Luxury Home Edition

Freese Architecture’s “Prairie Pavilions” project recently got spotlighted in Oklahoma Magazine’s Luxury Homes edition in July 2018. The Joplin-based home is a great example of one designed with the customers’ lifestyle and surroundings in mind. [...]

Our Angle: Designing the Kitchen

Whether you’re an accomplished culinary artist or Iron Chef wannabe, the kitchen should take center stage in your home design. Kitchens have moved from unseen backroom workshops into homes’ central family and public entertainment spaces. [...]

2018 Oklahoma Magazine – Best of the Best

Tulsa World: World of Homes

Oklahoma Magazine – 3D Printing

Our unique asset of in-house 3D printing has attracted some attention lately! Check it out!

2017 Oklahoma Magazine – Best of the Best 11 Years Straight

We have the honor of being recognized as one of Oklahoma Magazine’s Best of the Best Architects in the State of Oklahoma, for the 11th consecutive year! Thank you to all our clients, friends and [...]

We are 3D Printing!

We purchased our first 3D printer in 2013, which we replaced in early 2016 with a bigger, better model, giving us the ability to create models of astonishing detail and clarity. Architects have long known [...]

2016 Oklahoma Magazine – Best of the Best

For the 10th consecutive year, we have been honored by Oklahoma Magazine as one of Oklahoma’s Best of the Best Architects. We appreciate the recognition. We would like to think that this is the result [...]