I’ve been tracking my home office productivity metrics for years now, and one pattern kept nagging at me: my best work days consistently happened when I spent time on my…
I’ve been obsessing over London’s approach to bringing nature into urban spaces ever since I stumbled across an article about their “nature deficit disorder” initiatives. As someone who’s spent the…
I never thought I’d spend my evening reading industrial engineering papers about air pollution control systems, but here we are. It all started when I was researching air quality impacts…
Living in a pre-war building has taught me a lot about what lasts and what doesn’t. My studio might be tiny and dark, but the bones of this 1920s building…
Last week I was walking through a new subdivision with a client, looking at what the developer proudly called their “sustainable community.” Every house had solar panels, drought-tolerant plants (read:…
I spent a day with someone pursuing WELL certification for their corporate office redesign. They were documenting everything—light levels, air quality metrics, materials sourcing, acoustic performance, daylighting analysis. It seemed…
I had to Google “biophile” the first time someone used it to describe me. This was about two years ago during a productivity-focused Slack discussion where I’d shared some photos…
Last month, I read an article about a developer in Montreal who wanted to gut a beautiful Art Deco bank building rather than restore it. Got me thinking about how…
You know how sometimes you wander into a place for one thing and end up discovering something completely different? That’s exactly what happened to me last Tuesday when I finally…
Okay, so there’s this thing that happens when you walk into certain spaces where your body just goes “oh, thank god” and relaxes in a way you didn’t even realize…
Last month I had to take my wife to a new specialist about an hour from home. I was dreading it – you know how those medical office visits go.…
Honestly, some of my best productivity improvements have come from workspace experiments where I spent maybe $200 total. I’m not kidding. While people obsess over thousand-dollar ergonomic setups and smart…
I never thought I’d be the parent who gets excited about classroom lighting, but here we are. Last month, I found myself sitting in my daughter’s third-grade classroom in Portland,…
You know what I’ve learned after thirty-eight years in the same house? There’s a big difference between contractors who just fix things and craftsmen who understand what they’re working with.…
You know what I never expected to become an expert on? Restoration design centers. But when you’re a dad trying to fix up a 1960s split-level while learning about biophilic…