Since 2010, through VALDE, I have restored and reworked abandoned, neglected, and idiosyncratic houses, gardens, and landscapes in Europe and North America.

The projects have ranged widely: historic houses in St. Paul, Edmonds, Reykjavík, and the Engadin; an Olmsted Brothers garden and greenhouse near Seattle; a cedar artist’s house in the San Juan Islands; an eccentric 1980s estate on Whidbey Island; a fishing lodge in Vík, Iceland; haylofts in northern Italy converted into rough-luxury cabins; and interiors for a villa in Bolgheri. I am currently rebuilding an 1800s farmhouse on the Tuscan coast, together with its vineyard and wine cellar.

I work from the scale of the whole to the handmade detail, guiding a project from its first idea through to completion.

I believe every place has a character of its own.  For me it is never about imposing a style, but in discovering the nature of the relationship that a place has: the house or garden with the land, the climate, the region, its history, its neighbors, and the owners of the home. The atmosphere may be exuberant or restrained, refined or rough, formal or humble.

This way of working owes something to Christopher Alexander’s idea that places become whole through patterns of use, relationship, and gradual adaptation, and to Wendell Berry’s insistence that good work begins in attentiveness to particular places and communities. Architecture is not an isolated exercise. It is relationship, through and through.

Occasionally I write on food, shelter, tools, and the questions that connect them.  These notes are thoughts and questions for all of us, around our agency as living humans, our places and how they relate to one another, what tools we choose to use (and how), and where our responsibilities lie.

I speak about shelter, food, and tools — the things through which we build culture.

I began in international food production, then moved into technology and philanthropy. Alongside all of it, I kept building and restoring places. What connects these worlds for me is a longstanding interest in how systems become lived experience: how we grow food, shape land, make tools, direct capital, and build the places we inhabit.

A central question in my speaking and writing is how we live with the land that feeds us, and how the ways we produce and consume food shape landscapes, communities, and culture.

My work has taken me from large-scale commercial agriculture to subsistence farming, from agricultural technology and investment to agroforestry projects in Nigeria and agricultural cooperatives in Honduras.

I am interested in making these systems visible, and in restoring a sense of agency to both producers and consumers.

For me, shelter, food, and tools are not separate subjects. They are among the most basic ways we make a world.