OUR LEADERSHIP
Christine M. Vargas, President
Christine Vargas serves as president of Vargas Associates, and is the visionary behind the firm’s work. She oversees many of the firm’s projects and collaborates with a wide variety of professionals to ensure the successful completion of each client’s project. Christine has more than 25 years of design and management experience, with a portfolio that includes many high-profile healthcare, public safety and higher education projects in the greater Rochester and Buffalo/Niagara areas. She employs a dedication to excellence and a “whatever it takes” approach that set the pace for work of the highest caliber.
Fina Santiago, Vice President
As the firm’s vice president, Fina Santiago is charged with leading the firm’s day-to-day operations. She offers her clients exceptional problem-solving, communication and leadership skills, with an undaunted approach to every challenge. A talented and natural manager, Fina guides projects from their conception to completion and efficiently integrates her experience and knowledge with each client’s needs and goals. The results are reliably on schedule, within budget, and most important, exceed clients’ expectations. This commitment to service, along with Fina’s 20 years of experience, has delivered many successful projects for Vargas Associates clients.
WHAT WE CREATE
As designers and facilities managers, we help our clients create spaces with a true sense of purpose–spaces that are functional, inspiring and timeless.
Vargas creates more than workspaces. What we create helps to boost productivity. supports connections and collaboration, and promotes new ideas and innovative thinking. Our work in office design and facilities management ranges from highly specialized and customized, to buildings designed for a wide range of needs, to the re-purposing of an existing space for new uses or expanded growth. Whether we’re designing a commercial environment to enhance your brand and drive revenue, a comfortable healthcare facility that supports healing, or an educational environment that sparks learning, we’re committed to creating workspaces that are environmentally sustainable and uplifting to use.
HOW WE WORK
Together with our clients, we work to support an organization’s performance today, how it wishes to perform in the future and
how to meet the demands in the years ahead.
At Vargas, we take a completely integrated approach from conception to completion. We are taskmasters, specializing in projects which involve detailed schedules, tight deadlines, budget constraints and demanding goals. We handle the tiniest details of these processes and our comprehensive team approach gives us the ability to solve these intricate problems, save expense and reduce the stress, so clients can keep business moving while change is happening. We work developing strong connections between architects, clients, consultants and contractors, which is key to creating an exceptional workspace. Our team is dedicated to the success of each project placed in our charge and our principals are totally involved in each phase of a project development.
How do we work? We listen. We involve our clients. We discuss. We respond. We succeed.
WHO WE DO WORK FOR
Vargas provides interior solutions to a wide range of clients in various industries for new builds and renovations of all sizes.
Our clients are large and small, public and private, for-profit and nonprofit in a wide variety of industries from healthcare to municipal to higher education and more. We work throughout New York state and have extended our reach to select project across the country.
Our services span the entire spectrum of our client’s facilities needs, from strategic planning to facilities management to interior design.
Our exceptional design skills and solutions have helped clients deliver the best patient outcomes, inspired and enriched teaching and learning, supported the delivery of public services and transformed office environments. At Vargas, we are not only designers and facilities managers, but partners in health, collaborators in education, innovators in workplaces, creators of community and builders of a better world.
OUR FIRM’S PRINCIPLES
Purpose
Vargas Associates’ purpose is to create high-performance, progressive workspaces that help organizations become more dynamic and successful as they grow and change.
Mission
Vargas Associates integrates all facets of facilities design and project management to create innovative, high-performance workspaces that help clients grow and succeed. Partnering as each client’s go-to efficiency expert, Vargas Associates manages detailed schedules and processes from start to finish to prevent problems, save expense and reduce the stress of complex projects, so that clients can keep their business functioning while change is happening.
Vision
Vargas Associates is successful when the firm delights clients down to the last detail. The firm aspires to establish its high standard of service as the measure of excellence by clients, peers and the industry overall.
Promise
Vargas Associates promises to bring its undaunted approach to every client project and challenge, along with its expert execution and reassuring clam, to create highly functional, inspiring and successful workspaces.
Core Values
The people of Vargas Associates embrace the following core values in their work:
Energy
Curiosity
Openness
Insight
Fearlessness
Honesty
CERTIFICATIONS
CERTIFIED NEW YORK STATE WOMEN BUSINESS ENTERPRISE (WBE)
Vargas Associates, Inc. is a certified New York State Women Business Enterprise (WBE). This certification verifies that Vargas Associates has satisfied the following New York State requirements:
- At least fifty-one percent (51%) is owned and controlled by minority/women who are United State citizens or permanent resident aliens; or in the case of a publicly owned business, at least fifty-one percent (51%) of the stock of the business is owned by minority/women who are United States citizens or permanent resident aliens
- The management and daily operations of the business are controlled by one or more minority/women who own it
- Products and Services Codes:
- NAICS 541410: INTERIOR DESIGN CONSULTING SERVICES
- NAICS 541614: LOGISTICS MANAGEMENT CONSULTING SERVICES
- NIGP 91875: MANAGEMENT CONSULTING
- NIGP 95877: PROJECT MANAGEMENT SERVICES
DISADVANTAGE BUSINESS ENTERPRISE (DBE)
Vargas Associates, Inc. is certified with the Federal Government as a Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE). This certifies that Vargas Associates, Inc. has met the criteria necessary as a small business that is independently owned and controlled in both substance and form by one or more socially disadvantaged persons. The DBE program is a federal program administrated by the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) through the New York State Unified Certification Program (NYSUCP).
LEED – Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design
Christine M. Vargas, President is LEED certified and is an active participant in green building initiatives. LEED certification ensures electricity cost savings, lower carbon emissions and healthier environments for the places we live, work, learn, play and worship. LEED’s global sustainability agenda is designed to achieve high performance in key areas of human and environmental health, acting on the triple bottom line – putting people, planet and profit first.
