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 A Place To StartWelcome to the first post of the North Drawn Journal. I am starting this blog as a place to share a little more of what happens behind the work - the ideas, places, old houses, design problems, and stories that shape North Drawn Design. It seemed only fitting to start at the beginning: with a little about me, how I found my way to architecture, and how North Drawn came to be. I’m glad you found your way here - thanks for joining me! YesterdayGrowing UP NORTH Where did this all begin? Well, I’ve always been fascinated by places: how they feel, how they came to be, and the stories that remain layered within them. That curiosity eventually became a love of history, architecture, and design. And, much later, North Drawn Design. 
 I certainly didn’t understand any of this as an interest in architecture at the time. Looking back, though, I can see the beginnings of something that still shapes my work today: a curiosity about how things are built, an instinct to reimagine spaces, and a fascination with the stories embedded in the places around us. DRAWN TO PLACE Washburn was the kind of place I both loved and couldn’t wait to leave. It is a small town on the shore of Lake Superior, with a strong sense of community, quiet winters, and an ebb and flow that comes with summer tourism. Nature is abundant, and so is the history. There are old churches, brownstone buildings, historic homes, and structures that had already been standing for more than a century by the time I came along. The Northwoods climate shapes the buildings, too, although I didn’t fully appreciate that until much later. When I was young, my parents added a dedicated mudroom with a heated concrete floor to our farmhouse. We could come inside covered in snow, peel off our wet clothes, leave everything in a heap on the warm floor, and it would dry. As a kid, it was simply where the snow clothes went. As a designer, I now see it as something more: a space shaped specifically by the way a family lived and the place in which they lived. And then there's Lake Superior ...  DOG BEACH - WASHBURN, WISCONSIN  The scale, the quiet, the cold, the way the light reflects off the water. The lake is part of the landscape, but it also shapes life around it: the weather, the seasons, the buildings, and even your sense of direction. Despite the passage of time, it has remained an anchor for me and for my understanding of home. By the end of high school, I was itching to experience somewhere bigger. I left for Madison and eventually made my way to Milwaukee. It took some distance to recognize what Washburn had given me: an appreciation for nature and history, a sense of community, and an instinct for buildings that feel like they belong to their surroundings. Those ideas have found their way into my work in ways I probably couldn’t have predicted then. Place matters to me. Whether I’m working on an old house in Milwaukee or a new home in the Northwoods, I want the architecture to respond to where it is - to the landscape, the climate, the history, and the people who will live there. These days, instead of scheming about how to leave Washburn, I’m usually scheming about how soon I can get back. Today
 Then COVID hit. But from it came some awesome opportunity. I began working for a company that provided fully remote schematic design packages for mid-century modern homes across the country. I was finally doing residential design, which I loved, but entirely from a distance. I longed to be in clients’ home, getting to know them, understanding how they lived, and designing from that personal perspective.
TomorrowMY DIRECTION HOME When creating the name "North Drawn Design", it goes back to that idea of place. To me, “north” has always meant more than a direction. It represents where I came from in Northern Wisconsin, where I live now in Milwaukee’s North Shore, and the places, people, and way of life I’m drawn to. In many ways, North Drawn Design has become exactly what its name suggests: my direction home.  WILD BLUE - BAYFIELD, WISCONSIN As for where North Drawn is heading, I think the answer is becoming clearer all the time. I want to keep the practice intentionally small and personal, while taking on thoughtful, meaningful projects that allow me to really dig into the design - historic homes that need a new chapter, new houses with character and a sense of place, and homes tucked into the woods and along the water of Northern Wisconsin. I hope to continue building a small collective of talented people around me, collaborating with great contractors and craftspeople, and working with homeowners who value the process as much as the finished home. I’m not particularly interested in making North Drawn bigger for the sake of being bigger - I’d rather make it better, more focused, and increasingly reflective of the work I love to do.  If someone asked me what I hope a home I design feels like thirty years from now, I’d say I hope you walk in and don’t immediately notice the design at all - you simply feel at ease. The rooms flow naturally, things are where they should be, there is character and a sense of history, and the house feels rooted in its landscape, as though it belongs to the place it was built. It feels comfortable, functional, timeless, and safe. It doesn’t demand attention or announce the year it was designed. It simply feels right. It feels like home.
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