Last week my contractor husband Tom came home shaking his head about a job site where they’d just installed what looked like a kid’s bedroom set. “You should see this…
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.…
Man, I was such an idealistic mess when I first started consulting on sustainable projects back in 2015. I’d march into client meetings with this evangelical fervor about either passive…
Had a client call me last month, pretty frustrated about furnishing her new place. She’d just gotten divorced and moved into a smaller house – needed furniture fast but didn’t…
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…
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…
Three years ago I was ready to throw my laptop out the window. Actually, it was more like throw it at the contractor who kept insisting we should just use…
# Why Some Spaces Make You Feel Like Crap (And What I Learned From Fixing Mine) Yesterday morning, I was messing around with my little tabletop fountain again – you…
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…
So I got this weird call from my daughter’s school counselor last month. She mentioned they’d been looking into what they called “environmental factors” affecting kids with anxiety and ADHD,…
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…
I’ve been tracking the biophilic coverage from the past month and something’s shifted. It’s not just design magazines anymore—it’s real estate platforms, wellness investors, workplace consultants, and institutional facilities all…
You know what’s funny? I’ve been talking about toxic furniture materials for years, but nobody really listened until 2020 hit and suddenly everyone was trapped at home with their particleboard…
Last week a contractor called asking about bedroom furniture for a spec home he’s building. Not my usual territory, but he knew I’d gotten into sustainable materials and wondered if…
Last month I found myself 47 stories up in Milan’s Bosco Verticale, pressed against floor-to-ceiling windows while watching maintenance crews tend to living walls that cascade down like green waterfalls.…