I grew up around buildings that were maintained, repaired, adapted, and used hard. That made me attentive to the ordinary places where design succeeds or fails: the door that swells, the step that catches water, the room that never quite gets morning light.

The farm I grew up on was a set of structures that had to keep working through weather and use and the inattention of whoever wakes up tired. A gate has to swing right. A roof has to drain the way the slope of the land asks it to. An animal will tell you immediately whether the space you built for it makes sense. I learned to look at the way a building behaved under load — daily load, not theoretical load — long before I learned the word tectonics. I think this is where my attention to detail comes from, and my impatience with architecture that performs well on paper and badly in life.

I went to Washington State University for my degree and discovered fairly quickly that the projects I cared most about were residential. Multi-family housing, the Portland refuge studio, a mixed-use block in South Lake Union — what kept pulling me was always the question of how the building met the person who would live inside it. Since graduating I have worked on a custom residence in Churchville, Virginia, designing the primary suite, kitchen, and living and dining commons, and authored the complete construction documents for a carport built in Walla Walla in 2026. The Virginia House taught me what it means to design for one named family across four design iterations. The Walla Walla carport taught me what it means to commit a drawing to lumber and concrete. It is the first of my drawings to become a building, and it is already not the last: the Davis St House — a downsizing owner’s smaller home in College Place, Washington, that I carried alone from the first site visit through design, construction documents, energy-code coordination, and permitting — is under construction now.

I care about light and threshold and the sequence of arrival — the moves that decide what a room feels like before anyone names what it feels like. I care about material that ages into a site rather than fighting it. I care about ceilings that do real work, plans that support how a family actually moves through a day, and details that quietly absorb the friction of being lived in. I would rather a plan that works on a tired Tuesday than one that photographs well. John Lautner is a touchstone for me because his houses are about atmosphere — light and prospect and the body in the room — and not about a signature. Frank Gehry’s own residence is a touchstone for the opposite reason. It is a working house that took itself less seriously than the discourse around it, and it stayed a house. Between those two examples is most of what I want to learn how to do.

Where I want this to go is residential practice — not the catalog kind, and not the magazine kind, but the kind where a firm sits across the table from a client and a site and a budget and is willing to take all three of them seriously. I am ready to be the youngest person in that room. I want to author drawings that survive their trip through permitting and framing. I want to keep asking what it takes for a house to be a place a particular family dwells in, rather than a house any client could have ordered. That is the practice I am looking to join.