About Wallace Creative
Our team at Wallace Creative partners with hospitality and food industry clients to create exciting culinary experiences through our integrated design and construction approach with our talented design, budget, and construction teams supporting your project from start to finish.
Gabriela Philippon, AIA
Principal Architect
Gabriela began her career in 1993 at a design-build firm in Massachusetts. Since then, she has practiced architectural design in Maryland, Virginia, District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, and Georgia.
Through the many years of design, construction administration, and consultation, she has been able to develop an awareness to determine possible resolutions to a client’s situations, generating the needed concept design and drawings for presentations, permitting, and construction.
In the more than 20 years of experience, she has delved into hospitality, food service, corporate design, as well as residential design industries, and has built her career around working closely with the construction teams to create buildable designs to provide the clients the best possible solution to meet all of their goals.
John W. Gardner Jr.
President
John has over 30 years’ experience in the construction industry. He has extensive experience in construction management, design build projects, project planning, estimating, value engineering and product specifications.
The majority of his projects have been commercial tenant fit-out of office spaces, base building structures, and food service construction. His extensive knowledge of the construction industry has resulted in him being requested and accepted as an expert witness on construction issues in legal proceedings by judges from both the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia.
He has been a guest lecturer for the architecture program at Catholic University and he has recently managed the engineering of the load design for the first phases of Amazon's gas to all-electric corporate headquarters in National Landing.
Ariel Villazon
Architectural Designer
Ariel is an architectural designer with academic training in Bolivia, where he began his professional practice in 2018. His background includes experience in architectural design and project development within architecture firms in Bolivia.
​
Since 2024, Ariel has been part of Wallace Creative, contributing to design development, architectural drawings, 3D modeling, and construction documentation.