This work did not begin with travel. It began with space.
Architecture taught how environments shape behavior, movement, and feeling. Travel revealed how culture, rhythm, and place give those environments meaning. Storytelling — through words, photography, and visual art — became the connective tissue: a way to observe, interpret, and translate experience across contexts.
Where It Began
My fascination with how people live started early. On a family trip to Mexico, we shared homemade tamales in a white adobe home with a local family. Even with limited Spanish, I connected with a girl my age — and something shifted. That moment planted a curiosity that has never left: a desire to understand cultures, not just visit them.
Growing up in Portland, Oregon, I was drawn to global food, architecture, and the small details that reveal how a place is lived. I studied Spanish, then French, then — while working at a traditional Japanese restaurant — began learning Japanese and became Portland’s first female white sushi chef. The precision, balance, and artistry of that training shaped not just how I approach food, but how I see and work across every medium since.
Formation
Architecture trained the eye — sensitivity to proportion, flow, and material. Travel trained the intuition — awareness of culture, pace, and lived experience. Storytelling created continuity between the two.
An architecture degree in California anchored the professional foundation. Years of commercial design work refined the discipline. But it was the spaces between — a long-awaited trip to France, travel through Spain and the Netherlands, Sunday meals with my Italian-American family — that revealed what the work was really about.
Rather than existing as separate pursuits, these disciplines converged into a single way of seeing: one that values context over category, and experience over surface.
The Travels That Shaped the Work
My husband and I raised our two sons on the move — following their soccer journeys across the United States and abroad, from the Netherlands to Spain to Argentina. What began as family travel became something more: a sustained education in how different cultures organize daily life, approach food and hospitality, and inhabit their spaces.
My family’s dual Italian-American roots and citizenship have deepened our connection to Europe and continue to inform the way I explore, design, and create. Heritage travel is not abstract for me — it’s personal. That perspective shapes every journey I design for clients.
French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish allow me to move inside cultures rather than observe them from the outside — a distinction that shapes every journey I design and every space I interpret.
Why This Matters
This background informs how journeys are paced, how spaces are shaped, and how stories are told. It’s why I work across mediums without fragmenting the approach — and why experience is always considered before form.
The transitions — from architecture to travel design, from practice to studio — were not departures. They were the same pursuit, seen from different angles.
Or explore The Studio → for the philosophy behind the work.
Follow the studio’s ongoing observations in The Inspired Lens →