Rooted in Nature. Built to Outlast.
A trilobite is a prehistoric marine creature and the official state fossil of Ohio. They lived in the shallow ocean that once covered the Midwest, and their fossils are embedded in the limestone found throughout the Ohio River Valley. They thrived for over 250 million years by adapting precisely to their environment. That is the longest success story in the fossil record.
We named our firm after them for a reason. A trilobite is not flashy. It is elegant, functional, and engineered to endure. That is how we build.
How We Think About Buildings
Performance is the foundation.
A beautiful building that fails to perform is a beautiful problem. Every project at Trilobite Design starts with building science: how energy moves through a structure, how air behaves inside it, how the envelope responds to Cincinnati’s humid summers and cold winters. We design to Passive House standards because those standards produce buildings that are quieter, healthier, more comfortable, and radically cheaper to operate over their lifetime.
Sustainability is not something we add at the end of a project. It is the starting point. Our goal is for every building we touch to be all-electric, net-zero ready, and built to last for generations. We focus on insulation, airtightness, and ventilation first, then layer in the design, the materials, and the details that make a building worth caring about.
Every site has a story.
A hillside lot next to Mt. Airy Forest demands a different building than a 25-foot infill parcel in Northside. We study each site for its orientation, its slope, its solar exposure, its relationship to the street, and its role in the neighborhood. A home should feel like it belongs where it is. It should respond to its landscape and strengthen its block, not ignore either one.
Build once. Build right.
We choose materials and systems that minimize the long-term cost of owning a building. Oxidized wood siding that never needs painting. Copper roofing that never needs replacing. Triple-pane windows that insulate nearly as well as a wall. An airtight envelope that eliminates drafts and reduces mechanical wear. These choices cost more on day one and save significantly more over the 50, 75, or 100 years that a well-built structure should stand.
The construction industry is one of the world’s leading sources of waste and emissions. Every building we design is a chance to push against that. Not with gestures, but with measurable performance.
Sound matters.
How a space sounds is as important as how it looks. Our background in architectural acoustics informs every project we work on, from the obvious (concert halls, recording studios, music venues) to the overlooked (how quiet your bedroom is at 2 AM, how clearly a teacher is heard in a classroom, how a restaurant feels at full capacity). Passive House construction, with its airtight envelope and heavy insulation, creates an extraordinarily quiet interior. That is not a side effect. It is a feature we design for deliberately.
Meet the Principal
Scott Hand, AIA
Scott Hand is the Principal Architect at Trilobite Design and a licensed architect in Ohio, Kentucky, and Illinois. He studied architecture at the University of Cincinnati and spent the early part of his career in New York and Chicago working on performing arts centers, concert halls, and theaters, specializing in architectural acoustics.
He returned to Cincinnati and started building things.
He co-founded Urban Artifact, a brewery and music venue in a repurposed church in Northside. He launched Trilobite Design to focus on sustainable, high-performance architecture. He acquired a vacant lot through the Hamilton County Landbank in Mt. Airy and designed and built Cincinnati’s first PHIUS-certified Passive House on it.
That project changed the trajectory of the firm. It proved that Passive House construction works in Cincinnati’s climate and that sustainable building belongs in neighborhoods that need investment, not just the ones that can already afford it. It also proved something to Scott personally: that the real leverage in architecture comes not just from designing buildings for other people, but from developing them yourself.
Today, Trilobite Design operates as both an architecture practice and a development firm. Scott and his team continue to design high-performance custom homes for private clients across the Midwest. At the same time, the firm is developing its own projects: the Northside EcoVillage, urban infill concepts, and mixed-use proposals in Mt. Airy.
Scott serves as President of Mt. Airy CURE (Community Urban Redevelopment Enterprise), the neighborhood’s Community Development Corporation. Through CURE, he is working to bring meaningful investment to the Colerain Avenue corridor and the broader Mt. Airy community after decades of disinvestment. He writes and speaks publicly on sustainable development and urban reconnection, including a recent op-ed in the Cincinnati Business Courier.
His approach is direct: find the sites that need investment, design buildings that outperform everything around them, and take the risk to make them real. Architecture is traditionally a service profession with modest financial upside. Development is where design conviction meets real stakes. Scott is building Trilobite Design to do both.
Scott Hand is a licensed Architect in Ohio, Kentucky, and Illinois.
