During the first 30 years of business, the firm received and executed nearly one 1,000 commissions. The partners championed the movement to introduce classical order to America's cities by using models from Greek and Roman Antiquity and combining them with Renaissance forms. Examples of their early works are the Villard Houses (1882; now a part of the New York Plaza hotel) and the Boston Public Library (1887-95). The firm's Newport Casino (1879-80) and Isaac Bell House (1881-3) were American shingle-style designs.

They designed Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus; the University Club (1900); the Pierpont Morgan house (1906; now the Pierpont Morgan Library Museum); additions to the sides of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1906); New York's Pennsylvania Station (1910; demolished and replaced); the New York Racquet Club (1916-19); and New York University University Heights campus (now Bronx Community College). At NYU Stanford White designed the arcade (Hall of Fame of Great Americans), lined with bronze busts of famous Americans, intended to serve as a monument as well as an educational tool.

The firm's public and private buildings defined America's Gilded Age. 'The American Academy building in Rome, Italy, is one of the few buildings they designed outside America. Charles Follen McKim was among the founders of the Academy and was its president when the building was first conceived.

Together with their contemporaries Richard Morris Hunt, Carrère & Hastings, Calvert Vaux, and James Renwick, McKim, Mead & White succeeded in establishing American architecture as important.