OUR PROCESS

/01 DESIGNING FOR THE WAY YOU LIVE

Before I design anything, I want to understand how you already live. Where you land at the end of the day, which room everyone gravitates to, where you drink your coffee. What you see from your pillow, and whether waking up to that view feels restful or restless.

Early in one project, a client told me she wanted a set of stairs, in a house with only one story. One she planned to grow old in. So I gave her a reason to have them – a roof deck, with a place to sit and watch the sun go down. Stairs that keep her moving now. A view worth the trip. A design we can adapt the day the climb gets to be too much. She asked for stairs. What she wanted was to keep moving.

Throughout every conversation, I’m listening for what you say, and for what’s underneath it. Sometimes what surfaces is a south-facing entry with room for dozens of plants, where sun warms a concrete floor and pothos hang in a curtain of leaves. Sometimes it’s what isn’t surfacing. A beautiful mid-century home, buried under decades of a previous owner’s additions, where the design is everything we take away. I don’t start with a concept or a form to impose on you. I design the life you’re going to live, in the place you fell for.

/02 THE LARGEST GESTURE TO THE SMALLEST DETAIL

Most homes carry a seam you can feel –  the line where the architect’s work stopped and someone else’s began. I design so you never find it. What makes a home feel like yours doesn’t live in the architecture or the interiors alone. It lives in the intersection. It’s the same question, asked at every scale. Sometimes the architecture sets the terms. The window decides where the bed sits to catch the view. The slope decides where the stair lands, and the room arranges itself around it.

And just as often, the interior drives the architecture. The deep kitchen drawers you’ve wanted for years dictate the space they need. The shower niche has to reach back into the framing and the plumbing before a wall exists, wide enough for everything you want nearby, tall enough for a real bottle. The stone slab you fell for sets how big the island can be, and the island sets the shape of the kitchen around it.

That back-and-forth only works if one team is holding both sides of it. The result is that the bed faces the view, the niche is right, the island is the size the slab can deliver – and the finishes were never a layer added at the end. They were considered from the first lines.

/03 HOW A DESIGN TAKES SHAPE

The design that gets it right is one we build together, from first ideas to resolved details. The first marks on paper might be diagrams, how the spaces want to relate to each other. Then loose volumes, as those relationships become more specific. Then walls, shaped by what you respond to as we go.

Before a single line was drawn on one project, we spent an entire meeting looking at foundations. Pier-and-beam. Stem wall. Slab-on-grade. To most people those are just words, engineering decisions the architect handles. But each one changes how the house sits on the site, meets the ground, and feels as you walk up. On this site, a slope in a flood plain, that difference was dramatic. The house could feel grounded behind a stone-covered stem wall, or open and airy with nothing but a few posts touching the ground. I wasn’t asking them to choose a foundation. That’s mine to engineer. I was showing them what each one would feel like to live with, so I could design something that fit both them and the site.

None of this is a plan you bought with a set of revisions attached. It’s a process I lead, a piece at a time. Your part is to live your life and react. Mine is to know where we’re headed and bring you with me.

/04 SPENDING WHERE IT MATTERS TO YOU

Money is built into that process, not a surprise at the end. It’s also where most building anxiety lives, though it rarely comes from the cost itself. It comes from watching the money go places you didn’t choose, or wondering whether it went into your home at all. So early, before we’re attached to a direction, I’ll tell you what your project is likely to cost. Then we decide together what your priorities are.

I design to protect those choices. Every window, every stone, every tile is chosen to be right for the house and right for you, at a price that earns its place in the project. And because every choice is decided and documented before the job is priced, the number you’re quoted is the number the house actually costs — not a hopeful one that climbs once the work is underway.

Left alone, a budget drifts. Some of that drift comes from convenience, not design – engineered lumber where standard framing was all the design required, an upgrade slipped in because it’s easier to build, multiplied across a thousand line items. The rest is how estimates are made to look competitive – an allowance set low, a $5,000 lighting budget for the whole house, so the estimate lands easy and the real cost only surfaces once we’re choosing the pendants that finish the rooms. That drift stays hidden unless someone reads the estimate line by line, with your priorities in hand. That’s the read I do – so everything you pour into this stays pointed at the home you want.

/05 AND THEN WE FIND THE RIGHT PERSON TO BUILD IT

When the design is ready, I help you find the builder. The right one is different for every project. A 1962 hillside remodel needs someone who loves old houses and knows how to read complex details. Hand that same house to a firm that only pours slabs for new builds, and the thing worth honoring could get lost. I’m reading for specialty, for how they communicate, for whether they’ll understand how to respect the design. That’s what decides whether a build goes well.

So I bring you a shortlist of builders I’d trust with this house, vetted against what your project needs. A lot of how the next year of your life will feel is decided right here, in who picks up the tools.

/05 THE DESIGN ISN’T DONE UNTIL THE HOUSE IS DONE

Most people imagine that once the design is done, the hard part is over. The drawings go to the builder, the builder builds them, and you watch the abstract become concrete. Construction documents are meant to be exactly that — a precise set of instructions, followed as drawn.

But drawings only matter if someone holds the work to them. In the field, every detail becomes a live decision about cost and labor, and changes come up – a conflict the drawings couldn’t foresee, a material suddenly backordered, a better method proposed based on site conditions. Often those are worth considering. Sometimes a change serves the schedule more than the house, and from where you stand, the two can look identical. Reading the difference is my job.

That work has a name – construction administration – and it starts with how information moves. It’s natural to want a direct line to the person building your home. They’re the one making it real. For most of the build, you should have exactly that –  daily logs, weekly reports, photos, a clear view of where progress stands. But work that carries a technical judgment or a financial stake – a submittal, a substitution request, a change order proposal, an invoice – comes to me first. When those decisions route around the architect, the design is no longer the standard the work is held to.

Keeping it the standard comes down to one point each month – the payment application. The builder submits one, I walk the work against the drawings, and I certify what’s built. Not what’s promised. Not what’s coming.

Every change and substitution reaches me while it’s still just a proposal. I review the reasons the contractor presents alongside our design and the site conditions. Every line in a set represents decisions we made. So when “the original stone has to go” or “the roof needs rethinking” comes up, the question isn’t whether it’s easier to build. It’s whether the change honors the design, the budget, and everything decided before the contractor opened the drawings. Easier to build is never a reason to lose something we chose together.

Some things never make it onto paper, so I’m on site regularly, for two reasons. The first is verification, confirming the house being built is the house we designed.

The second is harder to name. By the time the structure starts to go up, I’ve seen it, measured it, drawn it, modeled it, detailed it, and studied it a dozen different ways. But knowing the house isn’t the whole of it. I’m also the only person on site who loses nothing by stopping to look. Everyone else has a schedule to keep. I’m keeping the house.

Often that is nothing more than refinement. A detail built against the drawn intent, caught while it’s still just framing, is a simple fix. Once in a while it’s more than that. On one remodel, a crack in an existing block wall caught my eye. Was it new? Had it been moving? In the moment, I couldn’t say. But I don’t have to trust my memory for that; the project keeps its own. I document conditions every site visit, no matter the state of construction, so I pulled from earlier logs. The crack had been there all along, but it was wider now. And we were weeks from setting a new roof assembly onto that exact wall. A wall already moving before any of that new weight arrived was not a wall to build on. I brought in my structural engineer and issued a detail to stabilize the wall so it could safely carry what was going above.

That’s what being on site is for. A builder is holding a dozen real pressures at once – schedule, crews, budget, the next job – and that’s their work. Mine is narrower – is the house being built the way we designed it? I have no other stake on that site.

You shouldn’t have to become a construction expert to end up with the home we drew. That’s the whole reason I work the way I do – so the house that gets finished is the house we set out to build.