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 2025. The Virginia House taught me what it means to design for one named family across four iterations of a client meeting. 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. It will not be the last.

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.