Melchior trained first as a artisan carpenter in Germany, a formal apprenticeship, fine finishes, the kind of education that gets into your hands and stays there. Then Stuttgart, architecture school at a fine arts academy, where the question was never just ‘can this be built,’ but ‘what is it actually doing to the person inside it?’
Cynthia spent her years on sets and in production offices and eventually in the buildings themselves, buying and developing them, learning that what makes a space sell is almost never what’s on the spec sheet.
They started Melchior King because neither of them could find a practice that held both things at once. The craft and the feeling. The tolerance and the resonance. So they built one.
CYNTHIA KING
Co-Founder – Creative Direction & Development
She has spent two decades in rooms where everything depends on whether people feel something. On set. In negotiation. Behind a camera and in front of one. Award-winning actor, model, film producer, and now real estate developer and agent, which turns out to be the same work with different stakes. Cynthia doesn’t read a floor plan the way most people do. She reads it the way a director reads a script: who enters here, what do they feel, where does the light fall, and does any of it matter. That instinct shows up before the drawings do. It’s in the first site visit, the first conversation about how someone wants to live,and it doesn’t leave.
MELCHIOR PETER
Co-Founder, Architectural Designer & Design-Build
Trained as an artisan carpenter first. Germany, formal apprenticeship, fine finishes - the kind of education that gets into your hands and stays there. Then Stuttgart, architecture school at the fine arts academy, where the question was never just can this be built, but what is it actually doing to the person inside it. Twenty years followed. European studios, then Los Angeles, and the particular demands of its hillsides and canyons, the soil that moves, the geometry that refuses to be orthogonal, the light that is worth every problem it creates, then Gensler. Independent design-build since 2008. Projects that he programmed, designed, permitted, built, and in at least one case owned and operated for fifteen years - long enough to know exactly where he was right and where he wasn’t. He’s currently completing his California architectural licensure. The timing, as he’d say, feels right.
Melchior & King made navigating permits effortless and delivered our project ahead of schedule.
Their expertise in complex regulations got our project back on track, saved us time and kept our budget intact.
