Before a drawing becomes a model.
Before a model becomes a building.
Before a building becomes a home.

There is a sketchbook.

It is where the first questions are asked, without pressure or polish:
What does this place want to be?
Where does the light fall for morning coffee?
What does the wind do here in spring?
What story is this client carrying with them?

Sometimes the pages hold careful sketches.
Other times they hold chaotic scribbles, half-sentences, arrows pointing nowhere, fragments of thought that only make sense weeks later.

Goals sit beside floor plans.
Reflections sit beside structural ideas.
Poetry sits beside pragmatism.

It is a living document — part journal, part laboratory, part confession.

No two sketchbooks look the same.
And no two projects ever should.

Each one is a response — not a template.

A response to the slope of a site.
To the smell of wet earth after rain.
To a client’s childhood memory of a kitchen table.
To a covenant line on a title.
To the way the mountains hold the valley in the afternoon.

The sketchbook is where those threads are woven together.
Where site, climate, context, regulation, and aspiration collide — not in perfection, but in exploration.

It is slow work.
And it is sacred.

At the end of the year, I often find myself leafing backwards through old volumes.

There are projects that never made it past concept.
There are early ideas that grew into homes that now hold families.
There are dreams that were too ambitious for their moment — and others that arrived exactly when they were needed.

Each book becomes a time capsule.

Not of buildings — but of becoming.