It’s a date Kim Montague will never forget.
“It was March 23, 2000, and I was here at Albert Kahn,” she recalls. “My mom had been ill with ovarian cancer and I received a call from her boss, saying, ‘Your mom isn’t here today and hasn’t called in to work. Something’s not right.’”
Frantic, Montague dropped everything she was doing and raced to her mother’s home in Ann Arbor.
“I got to her, but unfortunately she passed away the next morning,” Montague says. “It still makes me emotional talking about it. It was while I was sitting in that cold, stark hospital room with my brother and my mom, talking and sharing and praying and doing all the things that you do during that moment, that I realized what a horrible environment it was.
“Whether it’s the happiest day of your life, when a child is born, or the saddest, when you have to say goodbye, that (hospital) room is an extremely intimate place.”
The hospital room where her mother died soon became a career catalyst for Montague.
“While the nursing care was fine, as an architect I thought that room didn’t support us emotionally or physically,” Montague says. “It was just a box, not really set up for family to be there, and not a place I’d want to be for the last moments of my life. I was overseeing health care projects at Albert Kahn during my mom’s illness, and my passion for health care only intensified after that experience.”
It led to her decision, in 2007, to leave the firm and join Planetree International, a nonprofit specializing in patient-centered care that not only focuses on both patients and their caregivers, but also strives to unite communities around the world with a robust emphasis on health and wellness.
“I didn’t leave Albert Kahn because I was disappointed,” Montague emphasizes. “I left because of the work I was doing at Albert Kahn with Aurora Health Care in Wisconsin. They were a Planetree affiliate, and there was an opportunity to work with health care professionals, patients, and families around the world, furthering the mission to integrate healing spaces into health care operations. I wanted to take that work and expand it. In this case, it expanded worldwide.”
Montague spent almost seven years at Planetree.
“My official title was director of design consultation,” she says, “and I worked with health care systems in the U.S. and with the Veterans Administration. I also worked in Brazil, in the Netherlands, and in Japan, doing this consultative kind of work.”
After her years at Planetree, there were several other “pit stops,” as Montague defines them, but she never lost touch with her friends and former colleagues at Albert Kahn.
“There’s a Facebook page for what are called “Ex-Kahns,” Montague says. “It’s like an alumni association of people who have remained friends over the years.
“At a holiday gathering, I found out there was a major retirement and they were looking for someone to step into a leadership role, and also reframe the work that Albert Kahn was doing in the health care space and win some new great projects. So it was a simple decision. I rejoined the firm in March of 2023, and ascended to the presidency soon after.”
Already the first woman to hold that title in the firm’s history, this past April Montague added the CEO position to her portfolio, and eagerly anticipates a significant milestone for her firm.
“Albert Kahn founded his practice in 1895, and in 2025 we’ll celebrate our 130-year history,” she says proudly, adding, “and the firm has been located in Detroit the entire time. At one point, there were about 1,000 Albert Kahn-designed structures in the metropolitan Detroit area, 500 of which are still standing and have been refurbished or reused, and are still in use. So it’s a storied organization.”
Montague is wholly focused on adding more designs to the local landscape.
“We’re continuing our legacy from here in the Fisher Building, working with both large and small organizations — our Gems and Giants. Gems are those projects that may be small in footprint, but have incredible community impact. The Giants are the projects with a large footprint and immense community impact, (including) increased jobs, housing, services, and community amenities.”
Montague promptly reels off a handful of local projects: one for Corktown Health in Hazel Park, and others involving renovations for Garden Court Condominiums, the Albert Kahn House, and the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House.
“And then, on the other side of the spectrum, we’re doing large programs like the battery manufacturing facility for Stellantis in Kokomo, Ind., as well as an EV manufacturing site in Raleigh, N.C. It’s an extremely diverse portfolio, with projects all over the world.
“From Brazil to Russia, Vietnam, and the Middle East, you name it, we’ve probably done a project there. And we pride ourselves on getting about 75 percent of our book of business from clients that come back to us with other projects they want us to get involved in. The other 25 percent are those where we’re building relationships and involve competitive requests for qualifications and proposals.”
Much of Montague’s jammed schedule requires participating in meetings with both old clients and new prospects, planning projects in a demanding, post-pandemic world.
“(Our clients are) downsizing the amount of office space they’re allocating, and there’s a big push to create private spaces, so people don’t disturb those around them,” she says. “So, we’re very much evolving in terms of where we go as an industry.”
