Legacy Award

The Legacy Award recognizes and honors a person, company or organization whose contributions have advanced the Interior Design profession and enriched Interior Design in Oregon. They show exemplified traits with values held by the IIDA Oregon Chapter, including advocacy, mentorship, design innovation and sustainable leadership.

Congratulations to the 2021 winner of the Legacy Award: Roberta Pennington! Learn more about Roberta in her video feature:

Film credit: Videos filmed and edited by Casey Braunger | Quanta Collectiv

Roberta Pennington, IIDA, NCIDQ

Ankrom Moisan | Senior Associate/Interior Designer

Design Leader: With a theatrical background, Roberta brings big ideas to the table and loves to dream of the impossible and work to make it a reality. She wants everyone to be heard and never shuts anyone down. No idea is a bad idea to her and she welcomes all with enthusiasm and helps to understand why it would or wouldn’t work for a project. She is great at delegating successfully, while managing a million projects at once.

Advocate: Since arriving in Portland over 20 years ago, Roberta has been a master advocate for the interior design profession, having served many terms on both IDC Oregon and IIDA Oregon Chapter Boards as a voice for interior design advocacy all over the United States.

Roberta is a geek about the details of interior design. She loves BOMA and egress calculations, technical details and code compliance. She is exceptionally educated in these areas and speaks with confidence – further promoting the concept that interior designers are more than selectors of finishes. She drives this concept home at any chance she can, always with her signature charm.

Roberta also hosts a podcast that looks at interior designers in popular culture and pokes fun / critiques the depictions. It’s fun and entertaining – and advocates for what the profession of interior design actually entails.

Mentor: As a project manager, Roberta puts faith in junior designers; she will feed big ideas and then lets junior designers run with the concepts full force, while always being available for support, questions, mentorship. Her management style fosters immense and rapid growth in junior designers by balancing challenges with a lot of encouragement – she’s the best cheerleader! In the same way that Roberta is a design leader, she brings that same sense of listening, sharing and valuing those that she mentors.

Community Involvement: Roberta hails from Youngstown, OH and is proud of her upbringing and her roots. When a childhood friend announced he was hoping to open a community theatre in her hometown, she dove into action. She assisted him with selecting a site and campaigned to the Executive Leadership Committee at Ankrom for use of our VIZ Team department so that this project could have top tier renderings for their community outreach and funding programs. This project is currently underway. Through seeing commercial interior design as having an impact on the humans that interact with the spaces that we create. She forever is a cheerleader for design, it’s importance and the impact we have on our communities.

View the 2020 winner here!

View the 2019 winner here!

View the 2018 winner here!

View the 2017 winner here!

View the 2016 winner here!

View the 2015 winner here!