One House or a Thousand

I creative-direct places. The size of the place changes who's at the table. It doesn't change the questions.

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I get asked some version of this a lot: Wait, so do you design houses, or towns?

Yes. And condos, and hotels, and…

I understand why it sounds strange. A home and a town seem like completely different things. Different budgets, different teams, different timelines, different drawings.

I creative-direct places.

For me, that means asking: what should this place be, and how do we get there beautifully, meaningfully, and still on budget?

On smaller projects, I also personally design much of what I'm directing. As projects get larger, I build and direct increasingly specialized teams.

Places live or die by the same kinds of rules at every scale. A front door has a relationship to a room. A house has a relationship to a street. A street has a relationship to a neighborhood. And all of it relates to the people living there and the larger place around them.

My discipline is the whole. 

The size of the whole determines who else needs to be at the table.

The questions don't change

Whatever I'm working on, I start with some version of the same questions:

• What's already here? The land, the light, the history, the neighbors, what's missing.

• Who is this for? Not a market segment. Actual people: what they want, what they need, what an ordinary day looks like for them.

• What would help them flourish here? Not just shelter. Belonging, beauty, ease, a reason to stay.

• What larger whole does this belong to? A house affects a street. A hotel affects its land and community. A neighborhood affects a city. All flourishing is mutual.

• What shouldn't this become? Sometimes the clearest direction comes from naming the thing you're not making.

Then the work follows the same three stages at every scale: Discover what the place should be, Translate that into something each person on the team can build from, and Hold it through the thousands of decisions that follow. I wrote more about those stages in What does the creative director for a town do?

What changes each time is how the questions play out.

A family home

At this scale, I might draw the plans myself, choose the materials, the lighting, the furniture, and the art, and work alongside a builder, a landscaper, and a few engineers.

The questions get very personal. How does this family actually gather? Where does the morning light land, and who's awake to see it? What should be private, and what should be shared? If three generations will use this place, where does the grandmother sit?

A family compound adds another layer: the spaces between the houses. That's where it starts to become a tiny village. Paths, a shared table, a garden, a porch everyone drifts toward. The same questions I'd ask about a town square, just with fewer people and more names I know.

A boutique hotel

A hotel is a place people choose on purpose, usually for a few days, usually hoping to feel something.

So the questions sharpen. What could only happen here? What should guests feel in the first five minutes, and what should they remember five years later? How does the place take care of the land it sits on, and the people who work there, not just the people who pay to stay?

A regenerative hotel, especially, can't be a beautiful building dropped onto a site. The land is the experience. The architecture, the food, the gardens, the paths, the scent of the rooms, even the way water moves across the property should all feel like one idea--and not one note.

At this scale, I might still design parts myself, but more of my job becomes choosing and directing the right architects, landscape designers, interior designers, artists, brand people, chefs, and operators, and making sure they're all responding to the same place.

That's creative direction in concentrated form: a lot of specialists, one composed experience.

A town

At town scale, I'm mostly holding relationships between dozens of specialists who know their piece far better than I do.

I'm less likely to be drawing a building and more likely to be helping establish what a building needs to do for the street. How the street relates to the landscape. How the branding relates to the vision. How energy and water relate to the land. And whether all of it supports the experience we said we wanted to create.

I wrote about what that looked like at Trilith: the driving question, the landscape principles, the house numbers, and a railing made from trees that had to be cleared anyway.

The kitchen gets bigger. The job is still the meal.

A thousand homes on a tight budget

This is where people most often assume creative direction doesn't belong. Affordable housing has to be efficient. There's no room for nice-to-haves.

I think it's the opposite.

When you're building one house, a careless decision costs you once. When you're building a thousand homes, it gets repeated a thousand times. So does a good one.

Rooms sized for how families actually live, and to standard material sizes so nothing gets wasted. A shared green that makes small homes live larger, shaped so kids can play within sight of the porches. A house designed so a family can add a room when they're ready. Some of those decisions cost no more. Some can actually save money. But they have to be decided early, by someone looking at the whole.

At this scale, my job isn't to make an expensive prototype and repeat it. It's to find the handful of decisions that improve life every time they're repeated, then design those decisions into the system before scale locks them in.

A tight budget doesn't make creative direction a luxury. It makes every decision count more.

What changes, what doesn't

What changes from one scale to the next is the team, and how much of the design I do myself:

• A home: creative direction and design

• A compound: creative direction, much of the design, and a few collaborators

• A hotel: creative direction, selected design, and a specialist team

• A town or larger: creative direction and a multidisciplinary team of specialists

• Housing at scale: creative direction, system and prototype design, and engineers, manufacturers, and builders

What doesn't change:

• The questions.

• The responsibility for the whole.

• The fact that someone will wake up there.

So when someone hires me, the scope changes with the scale. The responsibility doesn't.

I'm there to help discover what this particular place should become, translate that into clear direction for whoever is making it, and hold the whole as it becomes real.

And the larger the team gets, the more important that last part becomes. More expertise means better parts. It doesn't automatically mean a better whole.

One house or a thousand, that's still the thing we're making.

The more people it takes to make a place, the more important it becomes that someone is responsible for the whole.