Why Your House is Fighting Against Nature (And Losing)
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately – you know when something clicks in your head and suddenly you can’t unsee it everywhere? That happened to me about three…
Why I’m Obsessed with Singapore’s Approach to Sustainable Design Education
There I was last month at 2 AM, squinting at my laptop screen trying to understand what this materials engineering professor from the National University of Singapore was telling me…
Testing Mushroom Walls and Other Weird New Building Materials That Actually Work
I spent three hours last month crawling around a house in Fremont examining what looked like walls made from compressed mushrooms. The homeowner, this software engineer named David, kept following…
Why I Ditched Instagram Minimalism for Actually Sustainable Living (And How My Storage Unit Neighbor Inspired My Best Design Advice)
Yesterday I watched my neighbor haul another truckload of stuff to her storage unit – that’s the third time this month – and I couldn’t stop thinking about how completely…
Why I Went Back to School to Learn What Interior Design School Never Taught Me
Standing in that graduate program coordinator’s office at Parsons last spring, I felt like I was speaking a foreign language. “So you want to study… sustainable design?” she said, squinting…
The Sustainable Materials That Actually Work (After 10 Years of Testing Them in Real Projects)
I’m sitting here drinking my morning coffee and scrolling through emails when I see another message that makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. This woman…
Why Most “Green” Interiors Are Actually Wasteful (And What Actually Works)
Last week my former colleague Lisa called me, practically in tears. She’d just gotten her first electric bill after moving into what she thought was her dream loft – one…
How I Learned That Interior Design Choices Were Sabotaging My Energy-Efficient Buildings
Back in my early days of getting serious about sustainable design – this was maybe 2018 or so – I had this wake-up call that honestly embarrassed me as someone…
Finding My Way Into Sustainable Interior Design (And Why It’s Nothing Like Regular Design Work)
I’ve been an urban planner for over a decade now, focused mostly on how we move around cities and where we put buildings. But about three years ago, I stumbled…
Real-World Sustainable Design Guidance That Actually Works on Jobsites
Last month I got this email from an architect in Denver who was pulling her hair out. She’d been pushing her firm to take sustainable design seriously, but every time…
How I’ve Watched Sustainable Design Go From Fringe Experiments to Mainstream Practice
Digging through old planning documents in Seattle’s archives always makes me think about how dramatically our approach to building has changed. Last month I was researching development patterns from the…
Why Most “Sustainable Design” Projects Miss the Point Entirely
Last Tuesday, I was sitting in a coffee shop in South Austin reviewing architectural plans with a new client when she pointed to her architect’s latest revision and said, “Look,…
Why I Stopped Using “Green” and “Sustainable” Like They Mean the Same Thing
Had a client meeting last week that reminded me why terminology matters so much in this business. They walked in excited about their builder’s “green home” proposal – bamboo floors,…