The Experience I Wanted to Create

Long before I could show someone what it might feel like to live inside an unbuilt home, I knew that was the experience I wanted to create.

My approach to design has always begun with the person who will live in the space. Not just what a home needs to contain, or how it ought to look, but what it should feel like to move through it. Where does it offer privacy? Where does it open toward the landscape? What happens when you need stillness, or connection, or a moment to yourself?

For years, I used 3D modelling to bring clients into their future homes before construction began. The model could make a drawing understandable. It could show proportion, movement, and the relationship between rooms. It made conversations more immediate, and decisions more informed.

But I could sense a distance that remained. A person could understand the geometry of a space without feeling what it might be like to inhabit it.

During COVID, I developed a business concept around that missing experience: Experience Your Home Before It's Built. I was imagining technology that could close the distance between seeing a space and experiencing one. I knew what I wanted it to accomplish. I didn't yet know what the technology would be—or how close we were to it.

Room to Trust My Instincts

Then came an unusual opportunity: the freedom to think about a residential environment as a whole. Not one room, one finish, or one small piece of someone else's vision. I could follow an idea from the approach to the entry, through the architecture and interiors, into courtyards and sheltered outdoor rooms, and outward toward the landscape.

I remain grateful for that freedom. It gave me room to trust my instincts—and to see what happened when those instincts could operate across an entire home.

What emerged was an architecture of relationships. Screens offered privacy without severing connection. Water marked transitions. Deep overhangs created shelter. Courtyards brought light, planting and open air into the experience of the house. Materials moved between interior and exterior so the boundaries felt less absolute.

I built the project digitally, making decision after decision about how these spaces should relate to one another. I knew the views. I knew the sequence of arrival. I knew what I hoped someone would feel standing there.

And then the house was never built.

There is a particular kind of loss in watching one of the most ambitious things you've created remain unrealized. Thousands of decisions, countless hours, an entire environment that existed in my imagination and in a model—but never as a place I could enter.

For a long time, the disappointment was inseparable from the project itself. It became easier to put the work away than to look at everything that might have been.

Finding My Way Inside

Years passed. My design practice evolved. So did the technology.

When I returned to the original model with today's AI-assisted visualization tools, I thought I was exploring what a familiar project could become with a new presentation method. I wasn't expecting to be moved by it.

But suddenly I could almost feel myself there. The warmth of sunlight across a floor. The protection of a courtyard. The weight of a wall beside an expanse of glass. The view waiting beyond a screen. It was the architecture I remembered, but the experience of seeing it had changed.

And then I recognized something even more surprising: I was responding to my own design in exactly the way I had spent years hoping clients could respond to theirs.

The business idea I had imagined years earlier had become the means by which I could finally experience a house of my own design that would never be built.

What the House Gave Back

AI didn't come up with the experience. It finally rendered the experience I had designed.

And as I looked through the new images, I began recognizing decisions I had made years earlier. Not because I would design every detail exactly the same way today. I've learned too much for that. But the underlying instincts—the things I was drawn to, the questions I was asking, the feeling I wanted a home to create—were unmistakably mine.

I understand the reasons for some of those decisions better now than I did when I made them. Sometimes instinct arrives before language.

I thought I was returning to an old project to see what it could become with new technology. I didn't expect it to show me who I had already become when I designed it.

The technology didn't show me a different house. It changed my relationship with the house I had already designed. And it gave me back something I hadn't expected to recover: the ability to appreciate the work without letting the way the project ended define its meaning.

The house never became a building. But its ideas kept finding their way into my work, my philosophy, and the business I continued to build. Looking back, I can see that the project was never only about what might have stood on that site. It was also about the designer I was becoming while I imagined it.