Who We Are

Look, I'll be straight with you - I didn't start out wanting to revolutionize timber architecture or anything that grand. I grew up in a family of carpenters outside Kelowna, spent my summers covered in sawdust, and honestly thought I'd escape all that when I headed to UBC for architecture.

But funny thing happened during my third year. Professor Klein had us design a community center, and while everyone else was sketching steel and concrete, I kept coming back to wood. Not because it was trendy - this was 2007, way before mass timber became the hot thing - but because I actually understood how it breathed, how it aged, how it wanted to be used.

After graduating and spending five years at a corporate firm doing glass boxes downtown, I was pretty burnt out. Every building felt like the last one, just with a different address. So in 2011, I took what little I'd saved, rented this tiny office space on West Georgia, and figured I'd give it two years to see if anyone actually wanted what I was offering.

Turns out, they did. That first client - still remember her, Mrs. Chen - wanted to renovate her heritage home in Kitsilano. She didn't want it to look "old" but she didn't want it to lose its soul either. We spent hours just talking about the original Douglas fir beams, how we could expose them, celebrate them, build around them rather than strip everything out.