Approach

One of my earliest memories is of running down a red dirt road toward a weathered, abandoned farmhouse. Its feeble, silvered cladding was covered in honeysuckle vines; the house stood entangled in volunteer locust trees, set high on a hand-tooled foundation in a field of tobacco that rolled in swells beneath the wind.

After years of trying their hand in new and unfamiliar places, my mother and father moved back home to the family farm in southern Kentucky to lessen the distance between generations and time. That late August, the long three-figure days had made ragged work of the land and of me. Red-haired and freckled, I slipped off under trees to find shade and stepped over the threshold of the farm’s old log house to explore a world of rooms that belonged to another age.

The home’s creaking oak stairs suspended overhead connected ramshackle rooms. A crumbling stone kitchen wing stood in a patch of wild blackberries down a dogtrot porch from the main house. Its passages traced the habits of lives long departed, with details born of necessity and imagination. The air, tannic and sweet, moved across faded hand-blocked wallpaper, tilted silver-toned photographs of people and their celebrations clinging to uneven walls, and relics and heirlooms spread untouched for years.

In a doorframe, I saw the heights and names of ghosts penciled and carved into the jamb. I too wanted a place in this home, so I pulled a pocket knife and gave my name to its frame, revealing coatings of paint and poplar wood underneath. The cut edges of this worn house exposed layers of past life. I was not alone in that house but heir to thousands of memories seen through eyes other than my own.

I carried that farmhouse with me long after I left it. As I grew older, I became fascinated as to why certain places hold such a lasting claim upon us. Seldom the work of any one hand, they are peculiar inheritances, assembled over generations through intention and accident, through the stubbornness of the land and the equally stubborn visions of those who first imagined them.

My approach to design has long been bound to this understanding of authenticity, wit, raffishness, and grace, born of the cultivated and the unruly. Beauty need not be without blemish, nor character without contradiction. Even a place newly made enters a world already crowded with character, ritual, and consequence. I have come to know that the most beautiful designs take their place among what endures.