Our History & DNA Get to Know Studio Main
We’re a small team of design professionals who create inviting, active, and sustainable communities through timeless landscape architecture. But we’re more than planners and designers—we’re also storytellers.
Through every project we develop, we represent the stories of everyone who will live, work, and play in the spaces we bring to life. We do this through our passion for people and a Main Street Approach.
Our Story
Founded in 2016, Studio Main LLC is a Landscape Architecture planning and design firm that has become one of South Carolina’s leading small-business firms—specializing in planning, design, and implementation of strategic master plans, corridors, greenways, parks, and trail systems.
Studio Main brings a real world perspective to your State, your County, your Town, your Community, your Village—we’re here to show you what we’ve learned the past twenty years working across 40 states, give you real world experience from a small-town Mayor, and make the place you call home better.
After leading thousands of miles of multi-modal planning and hundreds of miles of implementation for national design firms, Studio Main engages in a focused design approach called The Handlebar Perspective that leads with a commitment to transforming communities through community-oriented design.
Our Leadership
On any given day, you can find Blake Sanders, President, walking or biking to work, project sites, or for pleasure in West Pelzer, S.C.
Blake has nearly 20 years of practical, professional experience as a Project Manager and Senior Landscape Architect for regional and international design projects. He has taken streetscapes, trails and parks from concept to construction and is known for his innovative design and construction strategies.
Blake’s experience includes community-oriented planning and design through charettes, streetscape improvement planning, corridor studies, bicycle and greenway planning, as well as municipal, campus, park, and recreation design. He routinely provides project management and design from conceptual planning through bidding and construction administration.
Blake walks communities through the charette and design process, engaging them in a series of stakeholder meetings and open studio sessions that culminate with community driven design solution.
The Main Street Approach
When you live, work, play and learn all on Main Street you have a different perspective on the importance and vitality of major corridors.
A Main Street is simply a centralized core where residents can come together and the very embodiment of the community. A place where people congregate and interact on a daily basis.
Many small towns revolve around a single core, while larger metropolitan areas consist of multiple cores. We seek to strengthen those cores, thereby elevating the community as a whole in the process. They should be regenerative, seeking to repair damage to the community fabric where it exists and lifting up the lives of those who are influenced by this fabric.
The Main Street approach is more than design—it’s a lifestyle.
The Handlebar Perspective
Studio Main engages in a focused design approach that leads with a commitment to transforming communities through community-oriented design with something we call the Handlebar Perspective.
On any given day, you can find the Studio Main staff walking or biking to work, project sites, or for pleasure—giving senior leadership, designers, and staff a view of your area from the eyes of a citizen who would a take a stroll or a bike ride through your town—a handlebar perspective, if you will.
Through this perspective, we can gain better insight into what your citizens see at the street level and how they experience the place they call home on a day-to-day basis.
