I have loved houses for as long as I can remember—not just the grand ones or the glossy magazine spreads, but every kind of dwelling. Bungalows, apartments, rambling old farmhouses—each one a stage for human life. I’ve always been fascinated by how people make a place their own. Maybe it’s in my DNA.

My mother was a collector of homes—she had more than twenty-five rental properties at one point—and she could pull together a room with intuition and flair. She loved furniture, fabrics, and lamps, the sorts of things that make a house feel like a personality rather than a shell. But she wasn’t much for housekeeping. After raising a large family, her energy for laundry and dishes had long since expired by the time I came along later in life.

My father, a military man with an eye for order, took over those duties. He was tidy, disciplined, and surprisingly aesthetic. His bachelor apartment had been filled with mid-century furniture and mementos from deployments in Africa and Asia. Between my parents, I witnessed the full range of what makes a home work: my mother could conjure atmosphere; my father maintained structure. From them, I learned that a house lives at the intersection of creativity and care.

I tried to perfect the art of keeping house—I failed but found success in making things pretty, if not tidy!

When I set out on my own, I rebelled against my mother’s laissez-faire approach and decided I’d get housekeeping right. I bought a hefty tome called Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House and read it cover to cover. Cheryl Mendelson, the author, writes that housekeeping isn’t drudgery but a moral and creative act—“the work that makes a home alive.” Those words stuck with me.

Still, I discovered that I preferred reading about keeping house to actually doing it. Unless, of course, we expand the definition. Because when I think about “keeping house,” what resonates most deeply is creating beauty, character, and comfort—spaces that nurture the people within them. Maybe that’s the truest kind of maintenance there is.

Comfort, I’ve realized, isn’t just about soft textiles and good lighting. It’s the feeling that you’re allowed to be yourself in a space. The sound of the pizza oven heating up for dinner prep, the smell of butter and onions sizzling on the stove top, or the feel of the worn fabric in my reading chair and no one moving your coffee cup from its preferred spot even when the coffee has gone cold. Comfort isn’t something a designer installs… it is something that develops over time and in relationship to people and spaces.

The real magic happens in the quiet gestures of daily life

I obsess over all parts of domestic life—the cloth napkins I collect from resale shops perfectly selected for family dinner, the buzzing of the Nespresso promising a fresh coffee in the morning, the welcome of my, probably unmade, bed when I finally crawl into it at night. These are the things that make a house feel human. They are not acts of perfection but of living.

At Amity Worrel & Co., we often say our philosophy is Design That Makes Living Better. To us, that means our work doesn’t end when the last piece of furniture is installed. A home is meant to evolve alongside its inhabitants. This concept of human-centered design puts the person at the heart of every decision. Every layout, fabric, and finish should invite people to engage with the space—to cook, to read, to gather, to rest.

Design isn’t decoration for its own sake. It’s an act of empathy and anticipation. Good design asks: Who will live here? How will they move through the day? What will make them feel at ease? When those questions guide our process, the result is more than a pretty room—it’s a space that hums with the quiet rhythm of real life.

I asked an artist to illustrate our rooms— and draw in what was missing

A few years ago, I commissioned a young illustrator to draw several of our completed projects. The brief was simple: take our most polished photographs and breathe life into them. She added figures folding laundry, chatting over coffee, reading in bed, or lounging with a dog at their feet—small human gestures that transformed our spaces from pristine compositions into living stories.

When I saw the finished drawings, I was struck by how different the rooms felt. The architecture, the furniture, the palette—those elements had always been beautiful. But the people made them alive. The illustrations reminded me that every home we design is, in the end, a collaboration. We may draw the plans, but the clients complete the picture.

Those images now hang in our studio as a reminder that beauty is only half the equation. The rest comes from the life that unfolds within it. A family dinner, a pile of books, a dog asleep on the rug—these are the marks of a home well lived in.

Because no matter how carefully we compose a space, it’s the people who give it purpose. A house can be grand or modest, orderly or eclectic, but without someone to inhabit it—to fill it with laughter, movement, and love—it’s just architecture.

In the end, design isn’t about rooms—it’s about relationships

Design, at its best, is a kind of hospitality. It sets the stage for belonging. We can plan, draft, and install every element down to the last hinge, but it’s the people who bring the music.

Those illustrated rooms—alive with imagined conversation and motion—remind me daily why I do this work. I don’t design for stillness. I design for life.

Because a room, no matter how beautiful, is just a room—until people are in it.