About Hemma

Hemma is an interiors and construction studio working across Western Pennsylvania. We take one project at a time. Every specification passes through a single hand before it becomes a line in a proposal or a line on a site.

The work is made by a small, lean team. Framing is raised by Amish crews out of the Pennsylvania Dutch tradition. Hand joiners working the same way their great grandfathers did. The finishes are laid by Carpathian master artisans. Foremen and craftsmen trained across the old Austro-Hungarian world, with decades of commercial and residential work through Prague, Vienna, and Uzhhorod. Specialty finishes like terrazzo, tadelakt, decorative plaster, hand-joined timber are installed by the same hands carrying building traditions that have been executed for centuries.

The studio is named for Hemma of Gurk, an eleventh-century Carinthian noblewoman who spent her inheritance building churches, monasteries, and villages across what is now southern Austria and northern Slovenia. She did not preserve a legacy. She constructed one. The name is a standard against which the work is measured.

I grew up in Mt. Lebanon, in a house where Ukrainian was the first language spoken and how a room was kept was the second. Both were taught without being named. I studied briefly at Carnegie Mellon and then in the world. I followed Cyril and Methodius north — from the Peloponnese through the old Austro-Hungarian cities and into the Carpathians as far as the road went. Plaster, limestone, the way a courtyard in Thessaloniki holds its shadow all afternoon, and the way a monastery wall in Lviv holds it differently.

I came back to Pittsburgh and worked. Twenty-five million dollars of real estate under management in three years. My heart was in the work, and the rest was scaffolding. The business taught me what I was capable of. The work taught me what I was for.

Hemma is what the work became when I stopped counting.