Working on a project is always a profound experience. There’s never a moment when I stop thinking about the responsibility my client is handing me, essentially saying, “Here is where we choose to live, please create our home.” It sounds simple enough, unless of course, you hear it through my filter. If you do, this is what it sounds like: “Please create a place that supports us all, a place where we will be able to not just manage the daily tides that wash over us but thrive while they do. Please create rooms to nurture us and spaces to brighten our days; give us places of repose. Above all, please find the soul in this home so we can be connected to ours.”
Even though these wishes are unspoken, and only I hear them, and only in my heart and in my mind, I still hear them (and at a volume that’s very loud.) It’s a tall order, and one I take seriously.
It’s true that I have a tendency towards seriousness. I go on serious searches, quests that often take me to extremes. There have been 100 km ultra-races in remote places, and a 132-mile biking “Death Ride” in the California Sierras with its 16,000 feet of climbing.
It’s also true that I design for people whose work takes them to extremes daily. Perhaps no more so than here, with a client whose work impacts the health and well-being of so many people, myself included.
A Place of Healing in California
What must it be like to be called on, every day, to the make the kinds of decisions that most of us live our lives hoping we will never have to make? Decisions that could change the future of patients, families, and so many others whose lives they touch. That is what the days look like for one of the clients in this project.
I wanted our collaboration to give him and his family, beauty, joy, and calm. I wanted the environment to support him so he could go back, fight the fight, save the lives, and do the really heavy lifting that he does. He is called on to be so exceptionally present in his work, and so I wanted this home to be a gentle springboard, a place for healing, one that sends him back into the world soothed, renewed, and ready, and a place for his family to do so as well.
Where would we start? In the same place we started the four other times we worked together: with intentions.
Embedded Intentions
