About

I create 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.

I grew up in New Orleans, where I spent my teenage years building theater sets and constructing Mardi Gras floats — work that was physical, collaborative, ephemeral, and provided early insight into how environments shape experience. The impulse that drove those jobs is the same one that drives everything since: I need to make things that people can inhabit. I studied architecture at Louisiana State University, completed a five-year professional degree, and then moved to New York City, where I spent 18 years practicing at the scale where a building's program, its site, and its relationship to the city were genuinely open questions. I 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 was based in Melbourne, Australia, where I 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 not encountered before.

I left New Orleans because I found the city valued preservation over creation, moved toward projects where the brief was genuinely open, where the land hadn't been read yet, and where the program was still a question.

That instinct eventually led me to luxury hospitality development, where the stakes are high enough and the timelines long enough that the quality of early decisions compounds over years. I've 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 I have served as Design Director at Irongate, a development firm, building an Aman-branded and ultra-luxury properties in Mexico. My current project portfolio includes Amanvari (in construction close-out and approaching its soft opening), Estancia (in pre-development investor pitches), 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.

I founded the Office for Design and Development to build a practice 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.

My writing, which appears here and on Substack, 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. I write for developers and owners who have already been inside one of those projects and are looking for a sharper explanation of what went wrong.

I now call Portland, Oregon home.

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