DeArmond, Ashmead & Bickley


DeArmond, Ashmead & Bickley was an early-20th-century architecture and landscape architecture firm based in Philadelphia. It specialized in Colonial Revival, Beaux-Arts, and English Arts & Crafts-style buildings, especially suburban houses.
Clarence DeArmond was a 1903 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. He worked under Frank Miles Day, and formed a 1908 partnership with Duffield Ashmead, Jr.. Ashmead was a 1906 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, who had studied under Paul Cret, and worked under Wilson Eyre. In 1911, the duo brought in a third partner, George H. Bickley, a 1903 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a 1907 graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts, who worked under Horace Trumbauer.
One of the firm's notable commissions was for alterations to "Fairwold," an 1888 Shingle-style summer house in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, designed by Wilson Eyre for T. Craig Heberton. In 1916, second owner Richard M. Cadwalader, Jr. hired D, A & B to face the shingled walls with stone, and expand the house into a Tudor-revival mansion. Eyre's understated Arts & Crafts interiors were replaced by literalist period-revival set pieces. Six years later, D, A & B added a massive music-room/solarium addition, that was larger than the original house. The building is now Or Hadash Synagogue.
D, A & B also made major alterations to Cadwalader's Philadelphia residence. They stripped the 1860 townhouse of its brick-and-brownstone facade and stoop, replacing it with a limestone Beaux-Arts facade. In 1964, this became the Delancey Place house of the author Pearl Buck.
The firm disbanded soon after Bickley's death in 1938. DeArmond worked briefly for the Philadelphia Housing Authority in the 1930's, and was one of the architects of the Hill Creek Housing Project.

Selected works