AKA Studio, PC

Our portfolio includes Office buildings, Class-A Interiors, educational, healthcare and hospitality, as well as over 2,500 quick service restaurants (QSRs) including brands like Burger King, Bojangle’s and Arby’s; one off chef-driven restaurants, national retail brands, high-end residential homes and developments, mixed-use retail projects, and prototypical design development and branding. We also do project Permitting for over 50 projects every year, which not only saves our clients time but money.

We are fortunate to be involved with hyperlocal specialty projects as well, such as the numerous restaurants and small business shops we have done in local downtowns and main streets throughout Georgia.

Services

AKA Studio offers a wide array of design services to deliver an assortment of project types within a large range of scales. Outstanding design and client centric focus is at the heart of our services.

Regardless of project complexity or size, we endeavor to deliver the highest, most educated thought process to our clients so they can be well informed and make the best decisions for their project and needs. In short, we don’t tell you what to do, we listen to your ideas and help guide you through the process to help deliver what is hopefully what the client needs, not what we want. It doesn’t matter if it is a one-off restaurant remodel, or a midrise multi-use project: Our attitude is the same, our attention is the same and our respect for our client’s time and budgets are the same. Yes, our experience and portfolio is varied, but our methods are consistent.

In helping our clients, we offer these services in whole or in part, depending on your needs:

• Master Planning and Site Selection
• Architecture
• Interior Design
• 3d Modeling and Rendering
• Condition Assessment
• ADA Compliance Studies
• Sustainable Design
• Code and Zoning Analysis
• As Built Surveys
• Permitting

Our Team

We believe in work hard and play hard. We believe our team members must have the ability and time to do the personal things they need for themselves and their families. We believe that allowing them to help set their own work schedules and forge the path for their projects, they deliver a higher quality of service to our clients. For they know, with flexibility in their work life, comes great responsibility to ensure our clients needs are met and expectations are exceeded.

Many firms say their employees are their greatest asset, but we can honestly say our team members make the firm, not the other way around. There are some team members who took a leap of faith when AKA was started, and the firm’s gratitude to them is immense, for without them we wouldn’t have been able to grow the our firm and share our success with our other team members and clients.

About

Robert Zappulla founded ARCLINE Studio in 2009 during his transition from corporate employment with Wakefield Beasley & Associates, where he specialized in mixed-use retail and office projects, to his own private firm. After developing a successful practice with a focus on commercial, office, residential and restaurants, Robert was asked to re-join Wakefield Beasley in 2016 to oversee nationally recognized multi-use development projects. Robert accepted thinking that he would be able to bring his clients into Wakefield Beasley and help grow those practice areas and have a place to grow professionally, but after rejoining Wakefield Beasley, the firm was purchased by Nelson Global, a much larger national firm. Coincidently, several months after that merger, Robert met Arie Kohn who was in the process of marketing his own firm for sale so he could retire.

Arie Kohn started Arie Kohn Architects in 1984 with a focus on one-off restaurants, QSR’s, high-end single family and multifamily residential projects.

After meeting Arie in 2018, Robert left Wakefield Beasley and joined Arie, and soon after in 2019 Robert purchased Arie’s firm. Robert noted, “it was clear from early on that both of us had a client-centric philosophy, and both had steadily grown our practices through an enthusiastic referral network of clients who valued our work and candor. This success wasn’t by chance, it was by design”.

Robert, seeing the opportunity of combing what he developed with Arcline Studio and merging it with Arie’s practice, helped him envision a new combined firm that would be greater than it’s parts; capable of bringing a wider breadth of services to existing and new clients across a wider national footprint while maintaining a high level of service and value.

That new firm was AKA Studio, which embody Robert’s vision of a larger, yet more agile and attentive firm than either architect Robert or Arie could have developed on their own. The success of this transformation was almost immediate, where Robert’s past clients eagerly brought new projects to the new firm. Likewise, Arie’s clients saw the benefits early on of the new firm, for which AKA studio began providing a wider breadth of services and expanding on the client centric services Arie provided. Not so surprisingly in the first few months, Robert doubled the staff and workload of the new firm to the point they quickly outgrew their office space. Robert put it this way, “This approach to client, projects and a focus on relationships where we don’t provide services “like” any other firm, but provide services “unlike” any other firm was proof that we had something great and appreciated.”