Some may assume that most teenagers haven”™t a clue as to what they want to be when they grow up. For Tom O”™Brien, that was not the case. As a 14-year-old, O”™Brien sketched a blueprint of his career and was eager to begin its construction.
“That was a blessing and a fluke that I started working for an architect after school learning how to make blueprints and decided that I wanted to do that for a living,” said O”™Brien, president of O”™Brien Architecture in Mount Kisco. After graduating from the University of Toronto, an ambitious O”™Brien decided to start his own firm, “because I knew everything by then,” he joked.
A 25-year veteran of the business, O”™Brien did his first renovation in Chappaqua and from there took off to do projects all over the world. From a large horse farm in Bedford to a small studio in Amsterdam, O”™Brien sees the world as his canvas.
“My projects are either in a 45-minute commute or a 28-hour commute,” said O”™Brien. “The truth is because of the Internet and it”™s a small world after all, you can really make a house anywhere.”
In addition to his work, O”™Brien imparts his architectural prowess to Habitat for Humanity, which builds houses for families in need. Currently, he is building a house in Bedford that will go to an emergency professional such as a firefighter.
Today, O”™Brien Architecture is just one of the varieties of businesses that thrive on Main Street in Mount Kisco. A native of the town, O”™Brien has witnessed the dramatic changes that have led to the village”™s healthy economy.
“Growing up here I was able to see extreme transitions from the sixties and seventies, Mount Kisco really nose diving and a dead Main Street, to the mid- to late-eighties when (businesses) started coming back here,” O”™Brien said. “You see most storefronts either occupied or being renovated or in transition, but the large percentage of the town is healthy and doing great and I”™m really happy about that because I saw it around the time that it wasn”™t.”
The once “commuter town” has now turned into a business hub. O”™Brien said that growing up, most working people commuted to New York City to work.
“The town would kind of empty out during the day and all the commuters would come back at night,” O”™Brien said. “It”™s really different now”¦ now there”™s a lot of small business in town, local architects, Internet companies (and) of course all the retail. It”™s really an active and healthy town; it feels like that to me now.”
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