BY JILL NAGY
In 1995, two years after graduating college,
Kimberly Paone and her husband, Joseph
Paone, established Paone Architecture
PC, located on Route 9P near Saratoga Lake.
Paone, raised in Queensbury and educated
at the New York Institute of Technology
in Old Westbury, L.I., has a Bachelor of
Fine Arts degree in interior design and does
the interior design work for the firm. Her
husband and his brother, John, who joined
the firm a few years later, are the architects.
“I enjoy color, creativity, creating spaces
for people,” she said. But, as reality of the
business set in, she also needs to spend
much of her time in office management
these days.
“I am the type of individual who will do
whatever is necessary to succeed,” she said.
“When you’re young, you can conquer
anything,” she recalled, “then reality sets in.”
She taught herself how to use QuickBooks
and began networking with accountants,
tax experts, local contractors and other
specialists, and became familiar with the
laws, regulations and codes that control the
company’s work.
The members of the three-person firm
work very efficiently together as a team and
with clients, she finds. And she is largely the
glue that holds it all together. In addition,
she and her husband are raising two sons,
now teenagers.
She also finds time to garden, read, bicycle,
and network with other women in
business. “I do have a very busy life. I love
to do everything. It’s hard for me to say ‘no,’
” she said.
Her design work ranges from creating the
interiors of high-end projects to helping pick
out the best color for a repainting job.
The firm’s projects include residential,
commercial, industrial and medical buildings,
throughout the Capital Region and
into the Adirondacks. She referred to one
“perpetual job,” a medical office the Paones
designed in 2001, refurbished in 2011. Her
company is now designing an expansion.
She is also working on two projects at
Skidmore College. Examples of Paone designed
buildings, including the couple’s
home on Saratoga Lake, are included on the
firm’s website, www.PaoneArchitecture.com.
Paone finds that the field of architecture
is “very unpredictable,” with the volume of
work rising and falling. Still, they are able to
make time to take on and work with student
interns from local high schools and colleges.
Her advice to other woman contemplating
starting businesses of their own: “Do it with
confidence but know that you will constantly
be creating your own life balance.”