My name is Kevin Mendenhall and I am the owner of Drake Canyon Architecture, a custom Home Design Company located in the Phoenix area. I have been designing custom homes since 1995 and was a Contractor and Tradesman (Carpenter) prior to moving into design.
I am in a unique class of Architectural Designers, in that there aren’t a lot of us who started in the trades and ended up designing homes. Very few Architects or Designers have ever worked on a job, and very few tradesmen have much interest in working in an office. I so happen to like to get my hands into everything. As a young framer, I was building from a lot of plans that were pretty rough and we had to fix a lot of things in the field. I found out that you don’t have to be an Architect in the state of Arizona to design homes. It was at that point that I decided that I could create plans as good or better than the plans that I was building from. Licensed Architects included. The biggest difference between me and an Architect is that Architects learn most of what they know in a classroom, and I have learned most of what I know by building in the real word. Not less education, just a different kind of education.
Through the years, I have gained some extremely valuable information as a result of being both a Framing Carpenter and an Architectural Designer. There are things that occur to you during the process of designing a home, things that just come naturally, when you have years of experience in the field.
I work hard to make my customers happy. I know that the process of designing a new home can be scary and a lot of people can’t see or imagine what it will look like until it has been built. I do everything I can to try to help people see and understand what it’s going to look like. The image at the top of this page for instance, is a visualization of a home that I designed. I design everything in 3D by creating a virtual model of the home. This allows you to be able to see the house from any angle and gives you a good feel for what the finished product will look like.
I have a very strong work ethic and try to meet or exceed expectations. Many people will only ever design a custom home once in their lifetime, I try to help my customers make the most of the experience and usually offer suggestions throughout the process. You can read some of what other customers have said about their experience HERE.