Nick creates spaces where people feel genuinely alive and connected to something larger than themselves. That purpose has been consistent across a career that has moved through theater, architecture, urban design, real estate development, and luxury hospitality — not as a sequence of pivots, but as a single through-line.
He grew up in New Orleans, where he spent his teenage years building theater sets and constructing Mardi Gras floats — work that was physical, collaborative, ephemeral, and completely serious about how environments shape experience. The impulse that drove those jobs is the same one that drives everything since: he needs to make things that people can inhabit. He studied architecture at Louisiana State University, where he completed a five-year professional degree, then moved to New York City and spent 18 years practicing — most of them at the scale where a building's program, its site, and its relationship to the city were genuinely open questions. He approached those years less as a practitioner building a body of work than as someone who found the discovery process itself compelling: there was always more to understand, always a better question to ask, and the work was sharpest when done alongside people who felt the same way. Part of that time he was based in Melbourne, Australia, where he was embedded for two years to deliver the Collins Arch project for SHoP Architects — a different city, a different construction culture, and another set of problems he hadn't encountered before.
He left New Orleans because he found the city valued preservation over creation — and creation was what he needed. He moved toward projects where the brief was genuinely open, where the land hadn't been read yet, where the program was still a question.
That instinct eventually led him to luxury hospitality development, where the stakes are high enough and the timelines long enough that the quality of early decisions compounds over years. He spent more than a decade working across the design-to-development spectrum, learning where the expensive mistakes live: in the operator selection meeting that happens before the site plan is drawn, in the pre-opening budget that never gets updated after the proforma is approved, in the FF&E procurement timeline that every project treats as an afterthought until it kills the opening date.
For the past several years he has served as Design Director at Irongate, a development firm building Aman-branded and ultra-luxury properties in Mexico. His current project portfolio includes Amanvari (in construction close-out and approaching its soft opening), Estancia (in pre-development investor pitch), and Costa Palmas East (in early masterplan and operator selection). The work spans design oversight, stakeholder management, operator coordination, and the pre-opening logistics that fall between the organizational charts of every party involved.
He founded ODD — Office for Design and Development — to build the practice he kept wishing existed when he was on the developer side: a firm that engages before the brief is fixed, that brings design fluency to the decisions that are usually made without it, and that is honest about what those decisions actually cost. He is building ODD with his wife, whose partnership combines creative co-ownership with the kind of trust that makes the hardest work possible.
His writing, which appears on Substack and LinkedIn, focuses on the structural problems that cause luxury hospitality projects to fail — not the execution failures that are easy to diagnose, but the framing failures that are built into the brief before the architect is hired. He writes for developers and owners who have already been inside one of those projects and are looking for a sharper explanation of what went wrong.
He is based in Portland, Oregon.
CREDENTIALS & BACKGROUND (REFERENCE)
Education: Bachelor of Architecture (5-year professional degree), Louisiana State University
Current role: Design Director, Irongate Founder: ODD (Office for Design and Development)
Active projects: Amanvari, Estancia, Costa Palmas East (Irongate); proforma/underwriting app for hospitality with branded residences (ODD)
Content platform: Substack / LinkedIn Contact: nick@oddventures.co