MY Story

My Story

In 1987, I had a choice to make. I could keep chasing the stock market, or I could commit to the work I loved. I chose architecture, and I went after it from both ends: an architect's license and a contractor's license.

I trained at the Frank Lloyd Wright Studio Foundation, where I learned that a building should grow from its site, its structure and its purpose. That idea has guided every project since. But I learned something else early in my career, and it was harder.

I'd design a project carefully, with custom windows, engineered details and sections proving how it all went together. Then a contractor would swap in cheap vinyl windows, or tell the owner my design "wouldn't work." The drawings proved otherwise, but the building that went up wasn't the one I designed.

So I learned to build it myself. I completed 19 apprenticeships across the construction trades, until I knew every part of a building from the inside. Today my firm designs, engineers and builds under one roof, so what our clients approve on paper is exactly what gets built.

Since 1993, that's meant more than 1,500 projects: homes, studios, clinics, multi-family and community work. I've never left a project unfinished, no matter how difficult or costly it became.

I'm also a musician, and I've never seen a line between the two. Both are about structure, rhythm and getting the details right. Every project still starts the same way for me: a clean sheet of vellum and a site waiting to tell me what it wants to be.