Follow our grand design journey.

In 2022, our family moved from a small downtown condo into an aging and long-neglected property in the Pacific Northwest.

What initially felt like a dramatic change in scale — a large house, overgrown grounds, outbuildings, and more land than we understood how to care for — gradually became something deeper: an ongoing relationship with a place that continues to reshape my assumptions about design, ownership, maintenance, and time.

Professionally, I am an architect, and for years my work has centered around carefully considered homes, spatial hierarchy, materials, light, and long-term thinking. Entering this property, I assumed those instincts would translate naturally into shaping the landscape around us.

Instead, gardening introduced an entirely different pace and logic.

Plants ignored compositions.
Deer edited plans overnight.
Maintenance overwhelmed ambition.
Certain ideas flourished unexpectedly while others quietly disappeared.

Over time, the project became less about executing a vision and more about learning how to observe, adapt, and participate in a living environment that could never be fully controlled.

The videos and writing collected here document that process:
the slow transformation of a house and garden,
the accumulation of seasonal change,
and an evolving understanding that time itself may be the real designer.

Rather than polished reveals or dramatic before-and-afters, Would-Be focuses on the long middle: the unfinished years where places gradually become themselves.

Our family enjoys living here with four young children, one large dog, ongoing projects, too many plants, and more unfinished ideas than completed ones.

The garden has humbled the architect.

Designing a place and living with a place are fundamentally different things.