Spend time with the architect and designer Benita Cooper, the creative mind behind Haddonfield’s Benita Cooper Design, and soon your brain will want you to run out and draw something, or build something or make something, anything. You will view every part of your physical world as an opportunity for an increase in personal creativity, for more color, more harmonious shapes, punchier details, better design.
Cooper started her firm in 2008 and has since transformed it into a highly sought-after, award-winning practice, with dozens of clients in the area. She is the kind of person people call a “force” — with energy to stay on top of myriad meticulous details for renovation projects in various stages, help raise two sons, conduct free “maker” workshops with middle schoolers, design chairs and at some point start a nonprofit to help elderly people combat loneliness. She has put her signature stamp on dozens of projects in the Philadelphia area, everything from a 130-year-old historic home in Haddonfield, to Old City hair salon Opal and Boa to Haddonfield’s Wildfether Distilling, where she meticulously reimagined a celebrated 1857 Victorian house into a modern cocktail bar and micro-distillery.
Known for spaces that are designed to feel inviting, fun and contemporary, Cooper has a tightly choreographed sense of design and unmistakable style. She is not afraid of color and doesn’t like to “use the same color patterns in a cookie cutter way.” Her finished rooms often juxtapose angles, sometimes bold and unexpected hues, geometric-patterned tiling, eye-catching wallpaper.
But transforming a space with daring takes exacting attention. And Cooper says she strives to thread the needle between fresh or exciting and a harmoniously balanced finished product. Everything is planned down to “the millimeter.” The result is a signature freshness uniquely identifiable as her own.
“I like to keep giving people excitement,” Cooper says, “if you enter a dark small space, the next space might be really open, the next room might have this really bright colored pattern.”
Her distinctive aesthetic and community activism have lately garnered attention from the likes of NJBIZ, which named her a leader in its “Real Estate, Construction & Design” category and Philadelphia Business Journal, for which she won a “Women of Influence” honor last year.
Cooper says her work ethic includes a true desire to help and empower her clients. She talks about listening “very deeply” to what they are envisioning.
“Sometimes it’s not just what they say, it’s how they say it,” says Cooper, who comes to initial meetings ready to draw in her sketchbook, showing clients their ideas as they take shape and as real possibilities. “When people have that spark in their eyes, when they talk about what they are truly excited about even before they realize it. Then I ask them more about that.”
Renovations are, of course, notoriously fraught. They are a deeply personal project in one’s home over which the average person doesn’t have the level of control they are used to in other aspects of their life. A project gone wrong can have all sorts of negative outcomes. Cooper is intent on helping clients through the upheaval of such major changes –- a process that involves contractors, suppliers, local laws and can be “super disjointed” — so that they feel protected and helped every step of the way.
But still, while synthesizing her vision for each new project can be a challenge, Cooper wants to embolden her clients.
“I often say I will guide them and empower them to the edge of their comfort zone. That often means getting them to be at the very edge of what their current comfort zone is, so that they can see the possibilities of the new life they’ve envisioned for themselves.”
And, in 2018, to further expand her world-building capacities, Cooper started a manufacturing arm, Coop Forge, which fabricates furniture, architectural fixtures and signs. This allows for a comprehensive one-stop service that can take clients all the way from gutting a house or building an addition, through every design element in the new space, from chairs to lighting to the handles on cabinetry. With the option to customize so many elements, the finished work always bears Cooper and her firm’s sensibilities.
“Sometimes I think I’m a movie director setting up an environment for people to experience emotions,” she says.
Cooper was born in Seattle, moved to Hong Kong, then moved back to Seattle when she was 12. She fast-tracked her way to college by skipping high school almost entirely and going directly to the University of Washington through a program for gifted students. After double-majoring in art and architecture she deliberated on whether she should continue on in art or architecture.
“Art really allowed me to discover my own voice and my own perspective in a visual way. And architecture allowed me to think about technique and also contribution to society. And I found those two things are very related, but very different. Art is more about self-expression to me and architecture felt like a vehicle I can use to contribute.”
She decided on the latter and earned a master’s in Design and Architecture from Harvard in 2005. During that time she did stints in Italy, Chile and Mexico where she built a women’s shelter and learned about urban planning. Then in 2008, she was an employee at a firm in Philadelphia when a contractor told her. “You have what it takes to start your own firm.” She decided to go for it.
The majority of Benita Cooper Design jobs are residential. About 20 percent are institutional and professional. Working with business owners has other special rewards and Cooper’s goal is to help business owners reach their goal.
“I’m the first person who would hear deeply someone’s dream that they have kept in their hearts and minds for decades.”
For work on Wildfether Distilling, Cooper was intent on keeping the character of the Victorian house that once belonged to a notable doctor.
The firm has a core team of eight people, including architectural and interior designers, a construction specialist and her husband Jason, who serves as CEO and bookkeeper as well as the official house architectural photographer. (He is also a trained architect and partner in an adult sports league company). Staff meetings happen at their home, which the Coopers share with their two pre-teen boys.
Jason Cooper calls his wife an “extremely artistic person.” The first time he saw her, while in college, she had just returned from Mexico with dyed blue hair. “Who is that?” he asked a friend. “That’s Benita,” they replied, and he was smitten. The couple love being able to work from home, especially for their sons.
“I think the kids really get a very authentic, unfiltered view of what it’s like to be an architect and run a small business,” says Benita, “They get to see the outcome of the work. They walk around town and see the buildings.”
Cooper has many local friends and fans. Joe Murphy, a semi-retired compliance and ethics professional, active in Haddonfield civic life, first met Cooper when she worked on the Historical Society of Haddonfield Archive Building. He was blown away by the interior work she did and the two became friends. Murphy praises her design sensibility for leaving a “positive impression” in professional and public spaces, like at Haddonfield’s popular gourmet popcorn shop Sparrow’s.
“All of the designs are interesting, they invite you in, make you feel welcome,” he says. “If you’re sitting, you feel like you should be sitting there, you feel relaxed.
“Most places you go in and get what you want and you leave. In my experience, with her places, you remember the design.”
