Global planning and design firm PGAV Destinations have appointed four architectural designers to support the practice with its growing list of major leisure developments.

Marchelle Gant, Jinyang Liu, Ian Min and Joe Windler join a team of more than 120 full-time architects, designers, artists, business strategists, interpreters and planners.

The studio told CLAD they have the greatest number of senior project design team leaders in the industry, a strategy which has enabled them to take on ‘leisure destination’ master-planning and design projects worth more than US$1.2bn (€1bn, £847m) in 2016.

PGAV are currently developing masterplans for several attractions, including Tulsa Zoo’s Lost Kingdom, the Big Bear Alpine Zoo in California and the new Mississippi Aquarium.

“It’s an exciting time at PGAV Destinations,” principal and chair Mike Konzen told CLAD. “As a company, we are pleased that the majority of our new hires become long-term members of our team, and more than half our designers have been at PGAV for over 10 years.

“Nurturing talent within our creative culture of senior leaders has proven to be successful in producing forward-thinking ideas that exceed client expectations.”

Discussing the studio's policy of hiring recent university graduates, such as with the four newest appointees, Konzen said: “With new global client partnerships and expanding projects with existing clients, we are able to recruit the most talented designers that our universities are producing.

“They will work with the team on producing insightful primary and secondary research, start-to-finish strategic master plans and associated designs, and deeply-impactful storytelling.”