How we Work

I design spaces that remember what buildings are meant to do: honour the body, shelter the soul, connect us to the living world, and hold us in our becoming.

My practice joins research with the felt and sensed. It draws on environmental psychology, biophilic design, and years of study into how built environments shape our consciousness, creativity and capacity for connection. I also trust what can't be measured: the felt sense of a space, the poetry in light and shadow, the intelligence of nature as teacher and collaborator.

After 11 years in conventional architecture and interior design, a profound experience led me to walk away and begin again in 2016 with one question: what does it mean to design for the whole human being? That inquiry opened me to holistic design, deep ecology, communal living, and the study of what makes people happy and spaces nurturing.

I work with clients, architects, builders, tradespeople and artists as co-creators, and with nature as the ultimate design intelligence. Each project begins with listening: to what my clients want and need, and to who they are at their core. That listening is the foundation of everything that follows.

The spaces we create shape the world we inhabit, and the most meaningful ones come out of conversation. This is how I work: in conversation, in relationship, in co-creation. This is a conversation I'm here for.

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My path has been unconventional. Born in Damascus, I have lived across many countries and cultures, always drawn to architecture, history, art, craft and people. I studied French literature, worked in project management, and eventually trained in interior design in Canada, my first love. My real education came through curiosity: independent study, night courses, long hours in historical sites and museums, and conversations with architects, artists, ecologists, psychologists and social workers. One question guided it all:

How do spaces shape the experience of being alive?

In 2014, after time in the Amazon jungle, a night of the soul, I began questioning everything about my life and my practice. Two years later, I left conventional design approaches behind and began again.

That inquiry took me first to holistic design, where I earned an advanced diploma with distinction in the UK, then into environmental psychology and the study of what makes people happy. It drew me toward communal living and the question of how neighbourhoods might connect people rather than isolate them. I researched eco-villages and cohousing, trained in Ecovillage Design in BC, and lived in community myself to experience firsthand what supports and what doesn’t. At Tamera in Portugal, a peace research community modelling a culture of trust and cooperation, I studied the Healing Biotope and learned how communities are built and how they meet relational and existential challenges. I also learned facilitation skills and compassionate methods to resolve conflict.

I learned to listen through time in silence and meditation, and through days spent in nature, sometimes sleeping under open skies and walking wilderness trails. That practice built the capacity to hear what is hidden in every place and every person: connection, relationship, and the beauty that wants to be expressed.

I went deep into the research on how the natural world, and the patterns and rhythms found in it, affect our nervous systems, our creativity, and our capacity for connection. What I learned is that designing for wellbeing is a whole way of working: a conversation between the built and the natural, an eye for what each place and each person needs, and a willingness to treat every project as its own story, with its own potential.

Each project begins with curiosity and listening: to people, to place, to what wants to emerge. I research, I sense, I draw from both science and soul. Sometimes the design calls for bold colour and pattern, sometimes for quietness and simplicity, always with attention to how beauty serves as medicine and how a space can hold us in sanctuary.

The projects that call to me most: homes that reflect who their inhabitants truly are and support healthy living and meaningful relationships. Cohousing and communal living designed for genuine connection and community resilience. Affordable and supportive housing conceived with dignity and beauty, and the recognition that everyone deserves an environment that honours their humanity. Pilot projects willing to explore new paradigms.

Meaningful creation comes from collaboration; such is the way of nature. A seed carries its blueprint, but needs water, good soil, light and the right conditions to become what it already holds. Design is no different. The most meaningful spaces come from conversation: between vision and place, between those who imagine and those who build, between science and intuition, between human need and ecological wisdom.