I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the cost of doing business, and I don’t mean just the numbers on our balance sheet. I mean the human cost, the emotional cost, and the extraordinary financial pressures that seem to be coming at small businesses from every direction. After more than thirty years as an architect and designer, I have weathered recessions, housing market crashes, supply chain disasters, and more than a few questionable design trends. Remember when everything had to be gray? I barely survived that one. But what we are experiencing now feels different, and quite frankly, I’m tired of pretending that these are simply the normal challenges of running a business.

I own a design firm and a retail store. Between the two, we work with contractors, cabinetmakers, upholsterers, stone fabricators, furniture manufacturers, importers, delivery companies, and countless other people whose livelihoods depend on the work we create. It is a wonderful ecosystem of talent, craftsmanship, and hard work, and lately I have watched that ecosystem become increasingly fragile. The frustrating part is that so much of what is happening has very little to do with the actual work of designing and building beautiful homes.

I want to begin with something that troubles me far more than the price of a sofa or a sheet of plywood. The people.

For decades, Hispanic tradespeople have been an essential part of the construction community in which I work. These are people I have known professionally for years, some for more than two decades. They are skilled craftsmen, hardworking individuals, parents, neighbors, and members of our communities. They have built our homes, installed our kitchens, laid our tile, repaired our masonry, and contributed enormously to an industry that quite frankly could not function without them.

Now, amid intensified immigration enforcement, I have personally lost nearly a dozen trusted tradespeople from the workforce I depend on. Let that sink in. Nearly a dozen people whose craftsmanship I know, whose work I trust, and with whom I’ve built professional relationships over many years. Some have been detained or removed, while others are afraid to leave their homes and go to work. These aren’t anonymous names on a labor report. These are people who have helped me bring beautiful homes to life, people I have relied on and respected, and whose absence I feel both personally and professionally. I understand that immigration laws exist and that a country has a responsibility to enforce them. But I also believe we have a responsibility to recognize the humanity of the people affected, particularly those who have spent decades contributing to our communities. Watching hardworking people live in fear is heartbreaking, and frankly, it makes me angry. I don’t believe compassion and the rule of law should be mutually exclusive.

And the consequences extend well beyond the individuals and families involved. When skilled workers are suddenly unavailable, projects slow down. Tile installations wait. Millwork gets delayed. Masonry, framing, repairs, and countless other jobs become harder to schedule. The trades were already struggling to attract enough skilled workers, and now we are making an existing shortage worse. Those who remain available can command substantially higher prices, and while some of that is simply supply and demand, I have also seen pricing that makes me wonder when opportunity crossed the line into opportunism. Ultimately, the homeowner pays for those delays and increases.

Then there are the tariffs. Oh, where do I even begin?

Our firm has experienced the consequences firsthand. We have ordered furnishings and materials at one price only to discover that additional charges have appeared before the products arrive. Sometimes we absorb those costs. Sometimes we have no choice but to explain them to clients and pass them along. Neither option feels particularly good. We have encountered unexpected charges amounting to tens of thousands of dollars, and the most difficult part is not simply the amount. It is the complete unpredictability of when a tariff will change, what products will be affected, and how much the final invoice will actually be.

Tariffs are often discussed as though foreign countries simply write checks to the United States. That is not how import duties work. American importers generally pay the duties, and those costs work their way through the supply chain. Sometimes businesses absorb them, sometimes they pass them along, and sometimes both happen. For a small business, there is only so much margin available before those additional costs become impossible to absorb.

And now, with legal challenges and tariff refunds entering the conversation, I find myself asking another question. If an importer receives a refund on duties that were previously passed along to a small retailer or ultimately to a homeowner, how does that money find its way back to the people who actually paid the higher price? There is no automatic guarantee that it does. I would love to see a system that offers small businesses and consumers the same consideration that larger companies have the resources to pursue.

I understand the argument for protecting American manufacturing. I support American makers, and we proudly source beautiful domestically produced furniture and furnishings through Heirloom and AHD & Co. But thoughtful, layered design has always involved craftsmanship from around the world. Weaving, textiles, antiques, specialty hardware, stone, and decorative arts are part of a global exchange of skills and traditions. We cannot simply recreate every one of those industries domestically overnight, and pretending otherwise does not make the costs disappear.

Meanwhile, the cost of moving goods continues to climb. Diesel fuel powers the trucks delivering our furniture, cabinetry, building materials, and inventory. Freight surcharges appear on invoices, sometimes after we have already established pricing. Those charges do not vanish somewhere between the warehouse and the client’s front door. They are paid by someone, and more often than not that someone is the small business or the consumer. Apparently, even a sofa now needs a transportation budget worthy of a European vacation.

And then there are our employees. This may be the part that keeps me awake at night.

Our team members are navigating the same rising costs as everyone else. Healthcare premiums, groceries, fuel, housing, and everyday necessities continue to put pressure on household budgets. Naturally, employees need to earn more to maintain their standard of living, and as an employer I understand that responsibility. I want the talented people who work with me to have secure, fulfilling lives. But as wages increase alongside insurance, materials, freight, and operating expenses, small businesses face another difficult reality. We must either raise our prices, reduce our margins, become more efficient, or make painful decisions about what we can afford.

And there it is. The cycle that seems to have no end.

What concerns me most is that the conversation about affordability rarely seems to acknowledge how all these pressures connect. We talk about immigration separately from housing costs, tariffs separately from consumer prices, and healthcare separately from wages. But in a small business, they all arrive on the same desk. Mine.

I don’t have the luxury of treating these issues as abstract political debates. I have clients who deserve accurate budgets, employees who deserve fair compensation, vendors who need to remain profitable, and businesses that need to survive. Every decision has consequences, and those consequences eventually reach ordinary families who are simply trying to renovate a kitchen, furnish a home, or make their living spaces work better.

I am not writing this to tell anyone how to vote. I am writing it because I think we need to start asking better questions of the people making these decisions, regardless of political affiliation. Are these policies achieving what they promise? Who is actually paying for them? Are we protecting American businesses, or simply making it harder for smaller ones to compete? And when the government collects additional revenue through tariffs, shouldn’t we expect clear accountability for how that money is being used?

I also believe businesses, including my own, have a responsibility to be transparent. Not every price increase can be blamed on government policy, and not every company raising prices is acting unfairly. But neither should we accept every surcharge, every unexplained increase, or every convenient excuse without asking why. We owe our clients better than that.

I’ve spent my career believing that good design begins with understanding how all the pieces work together. Architecture, interiors, light, proportion, craftsmanship, and the people who bring those ideas to life are never independent of one another. Perhaps our economic and political decisions deserve the same thoughtful consideration.

Because when one part of the system is pushed too far, everything else feels it.

I still love what I do. I love the creativity, the craftsmanship, the relationships, and the extraordinary satisfaction of watching something beautiful come together. But I worry about the future of small businesses like mine, and I worry about the people whose hands actually build the things we design.

We can disagree about policy. We can debate the best way to strengthen our economy and protect our country. But I hope we can agree that hardworking people deserve dignity, small businesses deserve a reasonable degree of predictability, and consumers deserve to understand why everything seems to cost so much more.

Perhaps the next time you receive a construction estimate that makes you gasp, or wonder why a beautiful piece of furniture costs more than it did six months ago, you’ll understand that there is an entire chain of people and decisions behind that number.

And perhaps, before we ask why everything has become so expensive, we should start asking who is making those decisions, who benefits from them, and who is ultimately paying the bill.

Because from where I’m sitting, it certainly isn’t just the people making the decisions.