We believe that every home has a soul...

Are you ready to transform your home into its best self?

We love nothing better than working with our homeowner clients to nurture and bring out the best in every house we work on. We combine our passion for residential architecture, eye for detail, and design sensibility with our deep technical knowledge, robust construction chops, and practical know-how to deliver top-notch projects for discerning homeowners.

We learn who you are and what matters to you, and we translate that into spaces that are meaningful, beautiful, and practical – and deeply personal to you and your family. This is your custom house – shouldn’t it reflect you and the way you live? We also bring our years of experience to the table, helping you understand what your house is capable of, where the potential lies, and how to balance trade-offs among big dreams, budget, codes, structure, and your Pinterest board.

Here at Runcible, we offer full architectural services – that includes working with you from the moment the project is a twinkle in your eye, through a robust design process, contractor selection, pricing, selecting all interior finishes/fixtures/colors/cabinetry, etc, all the way through the whole construction process. You can learn more about what that entails here [link to FAQ], but in short, we’ve found it to be the best way to deliver the highest quality projects with the most efficiency.

Renovating or building a home is a huge undertaking, and can be quite stressful. Our clients are busy people, with jobs, kids, activities, and rich, full lives, and we’re here to take the lion’s share of the work, reduce stress and overwhelm, and be a resource, sounding board, and workhorse. We’ve been through this before, and we’ve got the experience to help our clients navigate the ups and downs of a project.

What Are Some of the Ways We Do That?
Weekly project meeting minutes during construction
Internal libraries of fixtures, finishes, and products - no need for endless Google searches!
Live, interactive design sessions and presentations
In-person guided help at showrooms to select fixtures and finishes
Regular meeting schedule during design, including milestones and deadlines
Deep bench of consultants and engineers for specialty situations
In-house preparation of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing drawings

Ready to take the next steps?

If you’re ready to hire a full-service architect, drop us a line.
Contact Us

Residential Project Types We Work On

Are you ready to take your house down to the studs? Are you thinking of redoing HVAC, electrical, plumbing, bathrooms, and kitchen? Are you excited to rebuild your house from the inside out, improving structure, systems, and energy efficiency? We love working on deep renovations like this, and specialize in finding all the potential hidden in plain sight. Every house is great…sometimes it takes a bit of work to help that greatness come out!

Explore Our Services

We routinely work on old houses, and specialize in bringing these beauties back to life after haphazard past renovations and neglect. We believe in honoring the past, while also creating liveable, practical, and beautiful spaces for modern families. We’ve worked on houses as old as 1730, and have ample experience on load bearing masonry, wood frame, and other historic building types.

Explore Our Services

Have a plot of land and ready to build your dream house? We’re ready to help you make that dream a reality! Whether it’s an urban infill site or a rural greenfield, we’d be delighted to work with you on your home.

Explore Our Services

If you’ve recently bought a farm or large rural property, or if you’ve owned one for years, you know that there are usually many buildings, competing maintenance needs, and a different way of thinking about long-range planning than what’s needed for a “regular” house. With Marilyn’s experience growing up and now living on a rural property with many barns and houses, and our work on recent projects, we’re uniquely positioned to help owners grapple with the challenges and joys of stewarding these types of properties.

Explore Our Services

Don’t need the firepower of full architectural services? Just need another pair of eyes or want to run some ideas by a professional? If you’re working directly with a builder, or have a smaller project that doesn’t need full services, or already have an architect, this service could work great for you!

Unfortunately, we don’t have the bandwidth to work on smaller projects. For us, that means anything smaller than a significant whole house renovation – so, your individual kitchen or bathroom project is probably too small for us. Other stuff that’s not a great fit for us:

  • Single bathroom or kitchen
  • Redecorating bedrooms/living spaces
  • Decks
  • Adding closets or a mudroom

That said, you might be a great candidate for our consulting service, so drop us a line and we’ll chat!

Featured Work

1/4
Custom Residential

Lexington Avenue 2-Family

The first time we walked into this house, we could see its potential - hidden under layers of unfortunate DIY renovations over the years was a beautiful, solid house with great bones. With clever design strategies, and a client willing...

Learn More
Custom Residential

Machinist Chest House

Kinetic architectural elements transform a dated penthouse into the ultimate space for entertaining When we first toured this penthouse unit with our clients, the most impressive thing was the view….the interior was dated and dark, and not functional for entertaining...

Learn More
Custom Residential

Stone House

A 300 year old family house gets updated for the 21st century Originally built in 1730 by an immigrant family from Switzerland, this incredibly special and rare example of early American vernacular architecture has been waiting for its tune up...

Learn More
Custom Residential

Family Climbing Barn

Our clients for this project purchased their house in Somerville for one major reason: it had a separate barn on the property, and they had their sights set on turning it into a private climbing gym, meditation space, and kid...

Learn More

Consulting

If you don't know what you need yet, don't worry - we have an introductory consulting package that's perfect for helping you learn how projects work, how to budget, and what your next steps should be.

Learn More

F.A.Q.

If you'd like to learn more about our process and about how architectural services work, check out our FAQ page.

Read All FAQs

Guided Worksheet Package

Representing years of accumulated knowledge from many projects, and from the perspectives of the architect, client, these worksheets are a shortcut that helps rocket you and your project forward through the process!

Purchase Here

What our Clients Say

1/1
Marilyn and her team helped us through every step of the renovation of our two-family home in Somerville: designing, selecting a contractor, drafting construction documents, and managing the build. They created a flow that fits our lifestyle, pairing our desire..."

Marilyn and her team helped us through every step of the renovation of our two-family home in Somerville: designing, selecting a contractor, drafting construction documents, and managing the build. They created a flow that fits our lifestyle, pairing our desire for open space with a connection to the outdoors with functional areas to support two people working from home. We’re happy, it was easy to find a tenant excited about the rental unit, and we know this space will be our home for many years to come. Thank you Runcible Studios!” - Phil and Kim

Read More
I’ve worked with the team at Runcible across multiple renovations on my home in Cambridge and I cannot recommend them highly enough. Marilyn and team invested the time to deeply understand my objectives, concerns, lifestyle, and aesthetic – this design..."

I've worked with the team at Runcible across multiple renovations on my home in Cambridge and I cannot recommend them highly enough. Marilyn and team invested the time to deeply understand my objectives, concerns, lifestyle, and aesthetic – this design process yielded a highly functional and modern layout that feels natural in a 100+ year old home. Beyond the drawings, what really set Runcible apart was the spirit of partnership that I felt throughout each stage of the project. Throughout the ups and downs, I knew that I had a trustworthy, reliable, and insightful advisor that I could depend on. The house looks absolutely incredible, and I couldn’t have done it without Runcible!

Read More
Private Client
As a construction company, we’ve worked with many architects over the years and Marilyn and her firm, Runcible Studios is second to none. Her depth of knowledge, eye for design and knack for problem solving are outstanding. Runcible Studios is..."

As a construction company, we’ve worked with many architects over the years and Marilyn and her firm, Runcible Studios is second to none. Her depth of knowledge, eye for design and knack for problem solving are outstanding. Runcible Studios is always responsive and a pleasure to work with. Marilyn achieves giving clients what they want - even if they are not entirely sure in the beginning - look effortless. We look forward to continuing our partnership with Marilyn and her firm for many years to come.

Read More
Ralph Khirallah Owner, RK Construction
We had a great experience working with Marilyn. We started with some pretty vague requirements and a very broad sense of what types of design we liked. Marilyn did an amazing job of going from this to a really exciting..."

We had a great experience working with Marilyn. We started with some pretty vague requirements and a very broad sense of what types of design we liked. Marilyn did an amazing job of going from this to a really exciting proposal that was beyond what we thought was possible and yet fit our budget and needs as a growing family. From that initial meeting to the completion of the project there wasn’t a detail that she wasn’t willing to jump in and figure out from helping figure out fixtures to dealing with the city for permits, working with the contractors, troubleshooting the inevitable curveballs that come up when construction starts, to thinking about how to arrange the rooms once the place was finished. Any big project will require hundreds of small but important decisions from paint color to light fixtures to bathroom mirrors. Marilyn took the time to understand our design preferences and presented us with a few options, saving us an inordinate amount of time and stress (and helped us avoid making some bad design decisions). We’re still overjoyed by how transformational the project was and feel so happy to get to live in such a functional and beautiful space.

Read More
Private Client

Our Blog