"Enough" series Part III, October 2026

People often ask me where an idea comes from. Do I sketch first? Do I look through inspiration images? Do I spend days thinking about floor plans before a solution appears?

The truth is much stranger than that.

When I walk into a house for the first time, I rarely see the house that’s standing in front of me. I see the house it wants to become. I wish I could explain it better, but the closest comparison I can make is that it’s like watching a cartoon being projected over reality. The existing walls begin to fade away. Rooms quietly exchange places. Hallways shift. A window suddenly belongs somewhere else. I understand the structure, I know what can and cannot move, but within those boundaries another house begins taking shape.

It has happened for as long as I can remember.

One project in particular still makes me smile. The clients walked me onto an awkward side porch that had clearly puzzled everyone before me. One side of the ceiling reached nearly ten feet high while the opposite side dropped to just over seven. The proportions felt uncomfortable, almost accidental, and they apologized for it before we had even finished the tour.

I stood there for a while, walked the room once, then twice, and finally said, “The kitchen belongs here.”

They looked at me as though I had completely lost my mind.

“A kitchen? Here?”

“Yes.”

“But what about the ceiling?”

“We’ll turn it into a barrel vault.”

There was a long silence.

Who puts a kitchen beneath a barrel-vaulted ceiling?

Apparently, I do.

It took some convincing, but today it is one of my favorite spaces we have ever designed. Not because it is dramatic, but because it feels inevitable. As though it had always belonged there and we simply uncovered what the house had been trying to tell us all along.

Clients often tell me I have a vivid imagination. Maybe they’re right. But I don’t think imagination is quite the word. I listen first. I listen to how they live. I listen to what frustrates them. I listen to what they think they need, but I also listen for what they haven’t yet realized they need. Then I begin seeing the house through both lenses at once. The architecture and the life unfolding inside it become one conversation.

That is why I have always believed architecture and interior design belong together. One brain. One vision. One conversation. I don’t believe in designing a structure first and asking someone else to figure out how it should feel later. The walls, the light, the furniture, the sight lines, the cabinetry, the proportions, and the experience of walking through the front door are all part of the same thought.

People often think they’re hiring me to create a beautiful home they’ve been dreaming about. They aren’t. They’re hiring me to keep them from making a colossal mistake.

That may sound dramatic, but it’s true. I notice things most people never think about. I follow the light before I decide where a room belongs. I think about how a family will move through the house every single day while also considering how guests will experience it differently. I obsess over the width of an opening, the space between a dining chair and a wall, and whether a room feels generous or simply oversized.

Then there is the television.

I have a love-hate relationship with televisions. Somewhere along the way we collectively decided that every room should revolve around one. Unfortunately, fireplaces never didn't get the memo.  We ask two focal points to compete for attention and then wonder why a room feels unsettled. These are the kinds of decisions clients rarely know they are paying me to make.

Good design isn’t simply choosing beautiful things. It is deciding what deserves attention and what should quietly support everything else. It is knowing when another bedroom isn’t actually the answer. When a better floor plan will accomplish more than another five hundred square feet. When children don’t need their own bathroom because, believe it or not, learning to share is not a design flaw. It’s a life lesson.

I know that opinion won’t win me any popularity contests, and I’m perfectly comfortable with that. One of the privileges of doing this for more than thirty years is that I’ve stopped worrying about saying what people want to hear. My responsibility isn’t to validate every idea that walks through the door. It’s to challenge it when I believe there is a better way.

Most clients trust the process. I would say about ninety percent do. The other ten percent usually need to live with their decision before they understand why I suggested something different. That doesn’t make them wrong. It simply reminds me that experience cannot always be explained. Sometimes it has to be lived.

I’ve made mistakes too. Plenty of them. There have been projects where budget constraints or structural limitations forced compromises I wish I hadn’t made. Every one of those moments has become another lesson. I tell my team all the time that mistakes are tuition. We don’t waste them. We learn from them, and then we make sure they never happen again.

Perhaps that is what clients are really investing in. Not my drawings. Not my specifications. Not even my ideas. They’re investing in thirty years of seeing what works, what doesn’t, and why.

I still begin every project with a pencil. People are often surprised by that. Yes, everything eventually finds its way into sophisticated software, but my brain has never learned to think through a computer screen. It thinks through my hands. The sketches come first. They always have. I draw the same idea over and over until the house finally says, “Yes. That’s it.”

There is one more thing clients often notice about me, although they rarely mention it until the project is over. I stay calm. Construction has a remarkable way of convincing everyone that the world is ending. The contractor is chasing the schedule. My team is coordinating a thousand moving parts. The clients are writing checks and wondering if every decision they’ve made was the right one. I simply remind everyone that we have a plan. We’ll figure it out. After all, we break wood and stone, not bones and blood.

When the project is finished, I hope my clients forget almost everything. I hope they forget how many decisions there were to make. I hope they forget the stress of construction. I hope they forget how complicated the process felt in the middle. Instead, I hope they simply walk into their home on an ordinary Tuesday morning, pour a cup of coffee, and feel something they can’t quite explain.

When a home is designed well, it doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t demand attention or ask to be admired. It quietly supports the life unfolding inside it. The rooms feel natural. The light feels right. The spaces simply work. There is no need to explain why.

And perhaps that’s the greatest compliment a designer can receive.

A home that feels as though it could never have been any other way.