Gil Schafer III

Founding Partner

“As residential architects, our highest achievement is to successfully create places our clients can call home. That word ‘home,’ to me, has everything to do with comfort, family, and friends — and memories, most of all. Growing up, I learned that if a house is going to feel like home, it has to create opportunities for memories, even in the smallest moments of life.”

Award-winning architect Gil Schafer, AIA , is recognized as one of the nation’s leading experts on contemporary classical architecture. He established G. P. Schafer Architect in 2002, and in 2023, the firm was renamed to become Schafer Buccellato Architects.

The grandson and great, great grandson of architects, Gil grew up with a strong sense of how a well-built, thoughtfully-designed home can bring pleasure to daily life. Over the course of his childhood he was fortunate to be exposed to life in a variety of places, including the Midwest, the Northeast, Georgia, California and the Bahamas, each contributing to his sense of what makes places unique and how architectural traditions and lifestyle are influenced by context.

Following undergraduate studies in Growth & Structure of Cities at Haverford College and its sister institution Bryn Mawr, Gil graduated from Yale School of Architecture with a Masters Degree. While at Yale, Gil studied under several noted practitioners including Thomas Beeby, Robert Venturi, Josef Kleihues, Frank Gehry, and Benard Tschumi and was the recipient of the H. I. Feldman Prize, Yale’s highest honor for studio work, in his final semester. Upon graduation, he worked at several highly respected (classical architecture) firms and spent (nearly) a decade at Ferguson & Shamamian Architects, working on major projects there.

In addition to his architectural practice, Gil regularly lectures around the country on the relevance and livability of traditional residential architecture today and is the author of two bestselling books, The Great American House and A Place to Call Home. His third book, Home At Last, is being published by Rizzoli Books in Spring 2023. Gil is a longstanding member of Architectural Digest’s AD100 list, a winner of Veranda’s “Art of Design Award,” and a recipient of the Arthur Ross Award for Architecture. His work and the firm’s projects have been widely published both here in the U. S. and abroad in both magazines and newspapers, including Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, House Beautiful, Veranda, Town & Country, Vogue, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among many others. Under Gil’s leadership, the firm’s work has also appeared in over 30 books on design.

Gil serves on several non-profit boards and advisory councils, including the Yale School of Architecture’s Dean’s Council, the Dutchess Land Conservancy, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. Gil served as the President and then Chairman of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, the nation’s leading resource for the classical tradition in architecture and its allied arts, for nearly a decade. Gil currently maintains architectural licenses in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, Maine, Texas, Massachusetts, Virginia, Tennessee, Rhode Island, Vermont, Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Arkansas and is certified by the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB).

He and his family divide their time between New York City, the Hudson Valley, and the coast of Maine.