About

Jeff Stikeman has been illustrating and designing architecture for nearly four decades. He lives near Boston, Massachusetts.

He works directly with internationally-respected architects and designers, creating passionate and expressive sketches and formal renderings of their work. The resulting images communicate architectural concepts powerfully, clearly, and with a compelling passion and human hand.

Jeff’s images are used to secure work, to facilitate decision-making, to win over stakeholders and the public, and to memorialize architectural works and their designers.

Contact

email: jeff @ jeffstikeman.com
call or text: 617.447.6945

…more?

Enough of that third-person grammar…. I’ve been married to Darlene for almost thirty years now, and have two grown boys. I left the long slog of corporate architecture in 2007, and cut my hours in half, spending more time at home with a growing family. The Mandarin Oriental Hotel is Boston was the last building I designed as Senior Associate and Senior Designer. I never looked back.

Illustrating architecture has allowed me to work with the finest designers, finest people, and on the finest projects. Every day is different, every client is special, every project expressive and fulfilling. I have been honored to have my work be the subject of an exhibition at the offices of Robert A. M. Stern Architects, in New York, the firm that gave me my start as an illustrator. The exhibit centered on our (now) 18 years of collaboration.

I have many other interests. I’ve spent the last thirty years researching and collecting American Bookbindings, principally those executed by my family, ca.1885-1900. Theirs was the finest bookbinding firm of that period in the United States, and I was taken by surprise when I discovered their work by chance, at the Boston Antiquarian Fair in the early1990s.

I also collect the work of Rudolph Ruzicka, a Czech-born American wood engraver and illustrator, who deserves to be more widely known.

I’m a member of The Grolier Club of New York, the Boston Athenaeum, The Ticknor Society, The Society of Printers, …and an old, obscure, and small private club of eccentric bibliophiles, with a handful of members from around the world. My collection of bookbindings was exhibited in Boston in 2021(catalogue forthcoming), and three bindings of mine appeared at an exhibition at the Grolier Club when I became a member. One of them was first exhibited there Christmas Eve in1890, shortly after it was bound by Henry Stikeman.

I’ve always loved flight, and in the past few years, as I flirt with retirement, I’ve been doing the things I wanted to when I was a young boy: skydiving; pilot’s lessons; …aaaaand have planned some aerial adventures that I should probably tell my wife about first…