A Design-Build Practice
We design and build custom homes through a disciplined, integrated process, where architectural intent guides every decision from concept through construction.
Our Approach
Collaboration, hurricane-exceeding construction, and contemporary homes that appreciate significantly above market.
Rooted in the Tampa Bay region and shaped by decades of experience in architecture, construction, and modern design, our work is both a reflection of place and a response to evolving lifestyles.
Our process is highly collaborative, not just in listening to your ideas, but in helping refine them. We challenge convention, temper indulgence with intention, and guide each vision toward a final result that is deeply personal, profoundly livable, and architecturally distinct.
Our Process
One team, from first sketch to final key.
Listen
Your ideas, your site, and the way you actually live.
Refine
We challenge convention and temper indulgence with intention.
Build
Hurricane-exceeding construction, carried by the team that designed it.
Live
Deeply personal, profoundly livable, architecturally distinct.
Our Story
It takes two things to build an exceptional custom home. Design judgment, the ability to translate a family's life into proportion, light, and material. And operational discipline, the ability to carry that design through budgets, permits, weather, and a thousand small decisions without letting it erode.
Very few builders hold both. MTBH Studios was built around a partnership between two people who, together, do.
No other custom home team combines a track record like Richard's, well over one billion dollars of luxury residential work delivered for some of the largest development companies in the United States, with the sophisticated organizational and operational experience Martin built at the highest level of Fortune 500 consulting.
The Partnership
It began as something simpler: a client relationship. Martin and his family met Richard before they ever moved to Florida and knew after a single meeting that when the time came, he would be the one to build their home. Five years later they found their lot in St. Petersburg's Granada Terrace, and Richard built it. So years later, when the two sat down to talk about the business itself, Martin was not betting on a stranger's portfolio. He was betting on the builder he had already trusted with his own family's home. Together they decided to take the practice in a modern direction and rebranded it as MTBH Studios, the same craft, carried by a design-forward identity and a systems-driven operation.
Most custom-home problems live in the gap between the drawings and the build, the vision and the invoice. The industry's standard answer is a handoff: the designer finishes, a builder takes over, intent erodes one compromise at a time, and the client referees. MTBH Studios exists because Richard and Martin refused the handoff. One team carries every home from first sketch to final key. Design decisions are made with construction reality in the room. Budget and vision stay aligned because the same people own both. And when something changes mid-build, something always does, the person adjusting the design is the person who created it.
The work is rooted where it stands: St. Petersburg and the greater Tampa Bay area. Coastal modern homes on the water. Architecturally distinctive infill in established neighborhoods. Homes shaped for Florida's climate and light, indoor-outdoor living, and the way this place actually lives. A studio with global roots and a wholly local focus.
Martin knows what it feels like to be the client, to hand someone the biggest build of your life and hope the promises hold. That is the standard MTBH Studios is run against: every client gets the builder Martin got.
By hiring MTBH Studios, you get talent proven with some of the most notable companies in the world, brought to bear on your own home.
Vision and delivery. Craft and controls.
That is the partnership, and it is in every home MTBH Studios builds.
Experience, Collaboration & Craft
MTBH Studios is guided by a team with roots in Boston and Denmark, bringing together design, construction, and technology expertise. Our diverse backgrounds give us a global perspective, but our shared focus is local, creating homes of exceptional quality and lasting value for Tampa Bay families.
Richard McGinniss
Richard McGinniss brings more than 40 years of senior executive leadership across luxury residential development, large-scale mixed-use construction, hospitality, and institutional capital programs. Always fascinated by the building process, Richard began his career as a project manager for the top custom home builder in Boston and was soon tapped to lead the first Ritz-Carlton Hotel and Condominium project in the city.
Richard McGinniss brings more than 40 years of senior executive leadership across luxury residential development, large-scale mixed-use construction, hospitality, and institutional capital programs. Always fascinated by the building process, Richard began his career as a project manager for the top custom home builder in Boston and was soon tapped to lead the first Ritz-Carlton Hotel and Condominium project in the city.
Over the course of his career, he has directed and delivered residential projects representing well over one billion dollars of luxury residential work delivered. As VP of a luxury residential development firm, he oversaw a portfolio of luxury condominiums, land subdivisions, and single-family home developments throughout New England. He was then recruited to Florida to develop a 13,000-acre Development of Regional Impact permitted for more than 20,000 units, where he led master planning and product development for over 30 models, an effort that has produced more than 8,000 homes built to date.
Following a national search across the thousands of employees at Castle & Cooke, David Murdock's billion-dollar development company, Richard was tapped as SVP to lead Phase 1 of Mr. Murdock's legacy $800M mixed-use North Carolina Research Campus, transitioning the former mill town of Kannapolis, NC into a major research hub anchored by every major university in the state. The project included an award-winning luxury golf course community and several multifamily developments. Richard was also recruited as President of a 2,000-unit master-planned waterfront community with seven miles of shoreline. In each of these roles, he served as the executive in charge of market research, product development, marketing and sales, infrastructure, and the design and construction of homes across a wide range of price points.
He has also been repeatedly engaged by international developers and ownership groups to triage and turn around distressed luxury projects. As a vice president with Taylor Woodrow, he took over management of its $800 million portfolio of luxury towers, including the Ritz-Carlton Residences in Sarasota and the Diplomat in Hollywood, Florida, and he has been engaged on other high-profile properties such as the Hyatt Aqualea. Each required a steady executive hand to resolve construction issues, restore client confidence, and deliver final closeouts.
Richard is the founder of MTBH Studios, Tampa Bay's first builder focused exclusively on modern, contemporary design. Under his leadership, MTBH Studios has designed and built more than 150 custom and semi-custom residences in the region, defining the contemporary residential vocabulary of St. Petersburg and the surrounding coastal neighborhoods. He continues to lead the studio's design-build platform, set its architectural direction, and act as the senior advisor on every client engagement.
Martin Hoeedholt
Martin brings more than twenty years of global experience in data strategy, governance, and enterprise transformation, paired with hands-on execution in residential construction and development. At MTBH Studios, he leads operations and digital transformation for a modern design-build platform serving the Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg market, translating the discipline of large-scale enterprise delivery into the craft and intimacy of custom home building.
Martin brings more than twenty years of global experience in data strategy, governance, and enterprise transformation, paired with hands-on execution in residential construction and development. At MTBH Studios, he leads operations and digital transformation for a modern design-build platform serving the Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg market, translating the discipline of large-scale enterprise delivery into the craft and intimacy of custom home building.
Martin began his career in Copenhagen and spent more than twenty years in enterprise consulting, most of them at Deloitte, most recently as a Senior Manager with Deloitte Consulting in the U.S. There he led enterprise-wide initiatives in data management, governance, and cloud modernization, directed global data and technology transformation programs for Fortune 500 pharmaceutical, automotive and consumer companies, and governed a $20 million automation portfolio. That background shapes how he runs operations today: with a bias toward clear systems, transparent reporting, and decisions backed by real data rather than guesswork. A Florida Certified Building Contractor (CBC1270195) and certified Project Management Professional, he applies the same rigor he brought to enterprise transformation across the full build lifecycle, budgeting, scheduling, project controls, vendor management, and the client and investor experience that surrounds it all.
His current focus is scaling MTBH Studios' design-build operations across custom residential and spec home development, with a particular emphasis on integrating AI-enabled workflows, modern project controls, and investor-aligned strategies. The throughline of his work is simple: pair design quality with disciplined, technology-forward execution, so that clients and capital partners alike experience a build process that feels as considered as the homes themselves.
A Modern Perspective on Custom Homes
Versatile
From ground-up custom homes to thoughtful remodels and architectural transformations, MTBH Studios brings a singular design vision to every project.
Value-Driven
With decades of experience guiding our process, we remain steadfast in our commitment to delivering exceptional value, without compromise.
Visionary
MTBH Studios helped pioneer the movement for contemporary residential design in Tampa Bay, translating years of creative exploration into bold, authentic, and enduring spaces.
Building in Tampa & St. Petersburg
Our deep roots in Tampa Bay mean we understand the region's unique opportunities and challenges, from hurricane resilience to indoor-outdoor living, from waterfront properties to urban infill sites. We've spent over 15 years building homes designed specifically for this place.