Attention is the whole job. Bespoke scales from a loft to a classroom.

My first fully immersive design project was a raw loft at 500 Molino Street. Four walls providing a shell for transformation and experimentation.

Most spaces are designed for the people who'll live there before anyone arrives, deciding in advance how you're supposed to live in them. This one decided nothing. I got to design it entirely around how I wanted to live, and that freedom is what hooked me.

That same instinct is why designing for students is the work I find most rewarding. The shift I care about puts the student at the center of the room instead of at its mercy: real options about how to sit, whether to work alone or with someone, where to focus. Give a kid those choices and you hand them agency over their own day. I didn't have that at their age, and I don't think my experience was unusual. A lot of us grew up being told how to behave, without much room to color outside the lines.

Paris showed me another world. I was still acting inside a required framework there, but I was exposed to a different way of life, to beauty realized in architecture, food, art, and personal style, all of it largely absent from my earliest years. So much of it was remarkable: the cobblestone streets, the history, the way the everyday got elevated into something worth noticing. It shaped how I process my surroundings to this day.

Pittsburgh has an industrial romance to its architecture that still pulls at me. And it's full of Tudor mansions and historic academic-revival buildings whose interiors I want to work against, setting modern furnishings and elements into those old rooms so the contemporary and the historic sharpen each other.

Los Angeles is a different draw. Anything you want to find is here, but you have to know where to look. The old downtown theaters are the example I go back to. You could pass the aging façade and never guess at the spectacular architecture waiting inside. For a while I was a docent at the Eames Case Study House, about as pure an example as there is of a home built around how its owners meant to live.