Designers & Builders

Two years ago, Steve Larosiliere started Purpose Design Build with closets, built ins and a few pieces of custom furniture. This year the firm is on track for 45 to 50 projects, with quotes going out in minutes and bathroom designs finished in a week. On the Designers and Builders Podcast, guest host Brittany turns the tables on Steve and asks how custom AI agents are helping him run a design build business.

Steve spent years as a marketing consultant to the design and construction space, after coming up on the millwork and lumber side of the industry. A renovation of his own home made him curious about a different problem: the client experience. He started small, earned his general contractor's license, and grew his design build business from 13 projects in the first year to 35 in the second. Early on, he was the bottleneck. Every lead, quote and schedule lived in his head, and he could hold about four projects at once. Systems got him to eight. Today the firm runs 12 to 14 projects in various stages, all tracked by the tools it built.

The conversation gets into how that machine actually works. Clients log into a portal to see and comment on their designs. An intake agent asks for photos and measurements and flags any address more than 30 minutes away. An estimator agent drafts quotes from the firm's own pricing book, a follow up agent keeps leads moving, and another drafts agreements once a client says yes. Steve is just as direct about where AI falls short. It makes things up, like moving drawers on a set of shop drawings, so nothing goes out until he has reviewed the PDF on his phone. "You can't be lazy with AI," he says. The leads are all organic. One homeowner designed her fireplace in an AI chatbot, asked who could build it, and was sent to Purpose Design Build. Locally, the firm gives a share of profits to neighborhood schools, and about 1,700 kids in Chicago now wear its logo on their shirts. One recent bathroom client found the firm on Google and recognized the name from her kids' school.

For designers and builders, this episode is a working look at what to automate, what to keep a human eye on, and how a small firm can grow without the owner holding every project in their head. If you're running a design build business and haven't started with AI, Steve's advice is simple: connect your email and calendar to an AI assistant, log every decision you make and why, record your calls, and fix your biggest pain point first. And don't try to build it all yourself.

Chapters

The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.

Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale

Connect with us at:

Connect with Purpose Design Build at:

https://www.instagram.com/purposedesignbuild/

Pablo Escutia wanted to be a psychologist. He ended up running KKC Development, a design build firm in the South Bay of Los Angeles that draws houses and then builds them, and arguing that the split between those two jobs was never real to begin with. A line from one of his professors stuck with him: everything works on paper. Finding out what happens when the paper meets the site is what moved him from architecture into custom home building, and it is the case he spends the rest of the conversation making.

He studied architecture, did internship work at the higher end of the profession, and found the corporate world too structured for the way he operates. Smaller firms in the beach cities suited him better, where the all hands approach meant the ceiling on what he learned was whatever he was willing to put in. After five years he crossed to the opposite side and went into construction, on the theory that there was more to learn where the two worlds meet than in either one alone. Understanding design is not enough on its own for custom home building. You also have to understand the materials, the structure, the geology of a site, how the sun crosses it and what the wind does to it.

Design build carries baggage in his industry, the assumption being that a firm is either good at drawing or good at building and cannot be both. His counter is that design build is a conversation where everyone involved speaks the same language, whether his team designs the house or works alongside one of the architects in town. In practice that means being brought in early, flagging the complicated detail during the design phase, and working out how a Spanish tail detail with bronze straps will weather in salt air before anyone commits to it. It is also why the firm takes on only a handful of custom home building projects a year and will sit through ten or twenty design meetings on each one. He is candid about the harder parts: inheriting the company after losing the previous owner to cancer, losing good employees before he learned to stop red lining their work, and keeping a business coach because nobody hands you a pamphlet when you open a company.

For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is a clear account of what changes when the person who used to do the work starts managing the people doing it. Pablo is specific about delegation, that if someone cleared a multi stage interview then the trust decision was already made at hiring, and that the best compliment he can imagine is an employee leaving to start their own firm. He is just as specific about where custom home building is heading, toward coalitions with architects who want a builder in the room early rather than a set of plans thrown over the wall. His closing advice is to decide which kind of builder or architect you actually want to be, then stay selfless about it, because a finished project belongs to the laborers and the subcontractors as much as to whoever signed the contract.

Chapters

The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.

Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale

Connect with us at:

You can connect with Pablo at:

Ten months ago Alyssa Olson left a salaried seat to run her own landscape architecture practice. Since then she has been moving between master planning work, local residential gardens, campus work in Michigan, projects in New York and Washington, and a backlog of wood projects she finally has the hours to build. The contrast is the part she likes. It is also what makes the calendar nearly impossible to hold.

In this episode, hosts Steve Larosiliere and Alyssa Olson catch up for the first time since she went independent and compare notes on what that actually costs. Alyssa is direct about the trade. The freedom and the day to day flexibility are real, and so is the work of building everything underneath them: the communication habits, the organisation, the finances, the tracking. A salaried job runs on someone else's structure, and a landscape architecture practice run solo does not. Steve walks through a single day on his own side of the business, from a coffee shop he is bidding with a general contractor partner, where the answer turned out to be charging for a pre-construction agreement instead of guessing at the scope, to an exterior renovation where the concrete came back the wrong colour and somebody has to be told to redo it.

The conversation then turns to a question neither of them has finished answering. Steve has been working out what his artistic point of view is, the way he would ask it of a painter, and he puts it to Alyssa plainly: with hundreds of thousands of people having moved through things she designed, what is her gift to them. Her answer is specific. The basics are non negotiable, the programming, the circulation, the stormwater, the paving and seating and lighting and planting that landscape architecture has to resolve before anything else. The craft lives in the small custom moments layered inside them, at any budget, including the affordable housing she has done a great deal of. On a plaza next to housing in San Francisco, built over an old rail line, she took one section of I beam and made it an armrest, a splash block for a rainwater leader, an edge detail and the gravel back for planting. One material, sliced and diced, doing four jobs.

For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is an unusually candid hour on independent landscape architecture and on the middle of a transition rather than the tidy version told afterwards. It covers getting paid to learn the work you eventually want to own for yourself, why public RFPs are often written with a team already in mind, and why knowing people in the places you want to work matters more than the proposal does. It ends somewhere neither of them planned. Talking about how artists show their work, they arrive at the idea of an exhibition, a room where the designers and builders they have interviewed come together, put the details behind their projects on the table, and say what went wrong and what they learned. They notice out loud that they have just designed something.

Chapters

The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.

Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale

Connect with us at:

A friend saw Priscilla Auyeung standing next to a materials palette in an Instagram repost and messaged to ask whether she took on interiors too. She did not, at the time. She said she did. GAMPworks was founded somewhere in the middle of the project that created it, and a year later that project is an award winning trading card store in New York City and the foundation of an interior design business she runs alongside a full time job.

Priscilla is the founder and design principal of GAMPworks. By day she works in master planning at a New York architecture office, where she describes herself as still near the bottom of the totem pole. By night she is the design principal, the business development person, the PR coordinator and the founder. The two scales feed each other. She spent last year on a minor league baseball stadium during the day and picking finishes and grout colours after dark, and found the thinking behind an entry sequence and the thinking behind two thousand square feet of retail interior sit closer together than the job titles suggest. Her account of how the studio actually got built, from filing the LLC to getting people to take a new interior design business seriously, is the part most founders leave out.

The store is a study in constraint. Two thousand square feet in a landmarked building that spent an earlier life as a meat locker, insulated so heavily the space rang like a music venue and needed an acoustic consultant before anything else. The client arrived with a mood board holding concepts in open conflict: feudal Kyoto, mid century modern, sports court retro, and something quintessentially New York. Priscilla and her design partner resolved it programmatically first, splitting a bright maple front of house from a walnut back of house, darker and more intimate, modelled on the private rooms luxury retailers walk their best customers into. What began as a furniture fit out with nothing structural touched ended with most of the walls demolished, a sink moved, a pantry carved out of an oversized bathroom, and permits filed under both the buildings department and landmark review.

For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is a practical account of how a side project turns into a firm. Priscilla is specific about what finally moved a client who came from finance and tech, which was never the aesthetic argument on its own but the same decision restated in terms of circulation, product visibility and durability across a long lease. She is just as specific about what she would streamline next time, from revision rounds that circle back to the first idea to the vendor and materials database she admits she still does not have. Anyone building an interior design business on nights, weekends and lunch breaks will recognise both the exhaustion she refuses to romanticise and the line she keeps coming back to, that nothing is as serious as we are making it.

Chapters:

00:00 An Instagram Repost That Started an Interior Design Business

04:09 Running a Studio on Early Mornings, Late Nights and Lunch Breaks

09:42 Feudal Kyoto, Mid Century Modern and a Sports Court

12:18 Designing the Back of House Like a Luxury Showroom

15:49 Bringing On Consultants, and What It Costs to Wait

19:33 How a Furniture Fit Out Became a Full Demolition

21:02 Making the Case to a Client Who Thinks in Numbers

26:48 What She Would Streamline on the Next Project

36:13 Budget, Durability and Building for a Long Lease

46:17 Building the Brand and the Advice She Gives Herself

The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.

Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale

Connect with us at:

You can connect with Priscilla:

Patricia Algara came to landscape architecture through feminism, not through drafting tables, even though four generations of architects preceded her. She founded BASE Landscape Architecture in the wreckage of a recession, with one project, one collaborator, and an office in an abandoned building. Nearly two decades later the firm is ten people, most of them women, most of them immigrants.

She grew up in Mexico in the 1980s surrounded by architects and never once pictured herself among them. Her undergraduate degree was in Latin American Studies, and her first job was reading grant proposals from women around the world at a feminist grantmaking organization in San Francisco. The same pattern surfaced in proposal after proposal: polluted rivers, unsafe streets, unequal access to resources. At a feminist gathering in Costa Rica, a prominent organizer said what was needed was to put every architect on a boat, sail port to port, and show them how cities are not built. Patricia recognized the problem immediately and also recognized that solving it was not an architect's job. It took a friend's offhand suggestion, and a dinner with a landscape architect she had never heard of, before she found the profession that fit.

Alyssa Olson and Patricia have collaborated on a mixed use project in the Mission, so this conversation moves quickly past the surface. They get into designing play spaces that children can reinvent daily, and why a structure that is not explicitly a castle becomes a castle, then a spaceship, then something else. They cover the shift away from metal and plastic toward sand, mulch, boulders and gardens in daycare environments, and the work of convincing caretakers that children getting dirty is the point. Patricia explains why the firm brought irrigation design in house, both as a hedge against the next downturn and as a way to treat water as something to slow, sink, spread and reuse rather than merely pipe. She describes ten years of returning every other month to a median that had been under grass for fifty years, hard clay that nothing could burrow into, until four bumblebee nests appeared. She is candid about AI and BIM, the water cost of the technology, and the expense of staying current as a small firm.

For designers, builders and firm owners, the useful thread here is how a small landscape architecture practice builds durability without abandoning conviction. Patricia treats portfolio diversification as survival, having started a firm in a recession, and she has structured the practice so passion projects live under a nonprofit umbrella and staff can pursue their own interests inside it. She has borrowed governance ideas from a firm that gave nature a seat among its trustees. She lets her team work from Italy or Bulgaria or wherever family is. And she is assembling a book of licensure stories from Latinas in landscape architecture, aiming to publish on International Women's Day 2027. Her advice for anyone earlier in the path is four words long: there is no space to play small.

Chapters:

The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.

Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale

Connect with us at:

You can connect with Patricia at:

Keita Turner put her project types and her budget range on her website, and the phone went quiet. She had decided her studio would no longer take the single bathroom or the paint colour consultation, and she knew going in what that would cost her. It is one of the more honest accounts of raising a minimum you will hear from anyone running an interior design business, because she does not skip the part where the referrals dried up.

Keita is President and Creative Director of Keita Turner Design, running her interior design business between New York and St. Louis on a look she calls enduring, fashionably classic. Her background is in fashion, and it shapes where she starts. Not with the path of the sun across a site, but with texture, colour and pattern, assembling a room the way a tailor assembles a bespoke wardrobe, holding the classic against the fashionable. She is also a researcher by nature. Invited to design a window in a former department store on Madison Avenue, a project in fashion's own territory she had wanted for years, she built the scheme around her great grandmother's indigenous heritage and its principle that whatever is taken from the earth is replenished. The circle became the motif, in villages and baskets, in flowers and artwork, and finally in a rug of jute woven circles fixed to the ceiling.

The conversation gets specific about pricing and positioning. Early on Keita charged travel time for work outside her area, until a client questioned whether that was fair and she felt bad enough to drop it for years. Then an out of state client from the financial sector asked why she was not charging travel time, since consultants bill for their time as a matter of course. What she took from it was not about the fee. It was that the first client had never been the right client. She is equally direct that a portfolio attracts what it projects, and that she spent a stretch producing work more traditional than she actually is, which brought more of the same. Show houses and pop ups became the way out, letting her work with artisan pieces and serious art before the clients at that level arrived. Her filter now is an eight page questionnaire on the colours, periods and furnishings a client likes and dislikes, on the reasoning that anyone unwilling to fill it in has answered a different question.

For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is a working account of moving a practice upmarket without a rebrand or a windfall. The commercial argument and the creative one turn out to be the same: you cannot tell a client's story in one room, so a scope threshold protects the work as much as the margin. Her approach to staggering projects so no two sit in the same phase is immediately useful to any boutique studio juggling multi state jobs, and her test for a finished room, that it should never look like a sterile, perfect showroom, is a standard worth borrowing. Anyone growing an interior design business on referrals will recognize the trap she names: keep saying yes to fragments, and fragments become the pipeline.

Chapters:

00:00 Growing an Interior Design Business Beyond New York

05:01 Learning to Say No to Partial Projects

08:11 Putting the Budget Range on the Website

09:35 The Travel Time She Stopped Charging For

13:45 Show Houses and the Portfolio You Want

15:09 Why One Room Cannot Tell a Story

18:31 The Eight Page Client Questionnaire

24:40 Bringing the Client's Travels Into the Home

29:03 The Madison Avenue Window and the Circle

32:30 Staying Boutique on Multi State Projects

The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.

Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale

buildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level.

Connect with us at:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/

Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders

You can connect with Keita at:

https://www.keitaturnerdesign.com/

https://www.instagram.com/keitaturnerdesign/

Steve Duncan decided to become an architect at fourteen. He graduated into the 2011 recession, watched all but four people in his class fail to land design work of any kind, and took a lighting design job instead. Fifteen years later he is Creative Design Lead at BŌK Modern, and he treats that detour as the reason he is good at the job rather than a delay on the way to it.

The route ran from lighting design back into architecture, then into real estate development and home building, then three years running his own business. One line from his first design studio has followed him the whole way. A professor quoted Socrates: there is no solution, seek it lovingly. At the time, with a black and white and fairly type A mindset, he thought it was nonsense. Now he describes design as a field with many right answers, where the real work is championing your perspective and then defending it, to colleagues, to general contractors, to developers, to installers, over and over, until the thing gets built. He is a trained architect who crossed to the fabrication side, and the move handed him something architecture firms rarely have: direct access to the people whose hands are actually on the work.

Much of the conversation sits at the seam between design intent and what a shop can physically make. At BŌK Modern he works in perforated and folded metal, where adding bends stiffens a panel enough to pull structural steel out of a job and take cost with it, and where one panel can read as a pattern at freeway speed then reveal moiré effects to anyone who slows down and stands close. He is direct about aluminum moving week to week under tariffs, and his answer is to walk into every project with value engineering options already in his back pocket, named upfront instead of sprung later. He argues architecture firms should bring fabricators in early, before hours disappear into detailing something that was never going to be built the optimal way. He is blunt about construction administration being a small slice of fee and badly undervalued. He sketches by hand before opening Revit or SketchUp, because modelling too early drains the energy out of an idea.

For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is a clear look at the handoffs where a project quietly loses its intent. His framing of design as a mindset rather than a title is immediately useful to anyone briefing an installer or a general contractor. His observation about conversation size, that two or three people make decisions while ten or twenty cover themselves, will be recognised by anyone whose week is mostly meetings. He also makes a specific call on the next five to ten years: the silos collapse, drawing production gets easier, and architecture firms, fabricators and financing start working concurrently rather than passing a baton down the line. For architecture firms trying to get a braver detail built, his advice is to assemble the technical team while the idea is still moving.

Chapters:

00:00 Deciding to Be an Architect at Fourteen

03:57 There Is No Solution, Seek It Lovingly

05:07 Defending a Design Vision at Every Handoff

07:39 Design Is a Mindset, Not a Title

09:38 Why Construction Administration Gets Undervalued

11:13 Reading Metal at Freeway Speed and Up Close

14:46 Aluminum, Tariffs, and Value Engineering

17:44 Bringing Fabricators In Before the Details Are Set

27:46 Meeting Size, Process, and Where AI Fits

35:15 Ornament, Texture, and Dappled Light

The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.

Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale

buildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level.

Connect with us at:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/

Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders

You can connect with Steve at:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-duncan-aia/

Seventy feet above downtown San Francisco, on the roof of a transit center, there is a half mile loop of path where strangers stop to point at leaves and name species out loud. Adam Greenspan, partner and design director at PWP Landscape Architecture in Berkeley, California, helped design that park, and he still goes back four times a year to look at the trees. This conversation with host Alyssa Olson is about running a landscape architecture practice at the speed trees actually grow.

Adam grew up in the Hollywood Hills, hiking native California hills and streams behind the house while going to school in the middle of the city. From kindergarten through high school he spent every Friday afternoon with a private art teacher, and toward the end of that stretch he built a pond and an aviary for songbirds in her backyard. She was the first person to say landscape architecture to him, and he did not take the advice for years. He studied studio art and sociology in college, with a work study job in the campus greenhouse, then moved to San Francisco to make art and paid for it at a retail nursery, where he became a certified California nursery person and handled the wholesale buying. A summer career discovery program in 1997, an internship at a San Francisco landscape architecture firm, and graduate school did the rest.

The real subject of this episode is time. Adam is direct about the myth that attaches to a legacy firm: people assume projects arrive at PWP with soft budgets and open timelines, and he says that has never been true. The fastest runs about three years, many run seven, ten or twenty. What changed the firm's thinking was its founder going back to work he had built thirty, fifty and sixty years earlier and finding that the trees, not the hardscape and pattern he was known for, were the strongest thing left standing. On Salesforce Park, Adam corrects the record: it is a public park built for an intergovernmental agency and the city of San Francisco, and Salesforce holds the naming rights. PWP still returns quarterly for maintenance review, pruning waited when five hummingbird nests appeared, and the park's performance is published through a national case study program that paired the firm with a university research team. At an art foundation and sculpture park in Maryland, close to 300 acres of demolished housing sites and mown pasture became forest and native meadow, and the arrival sequence walks visitors five minutes through habitat before they reach any art.

For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is a practical education in working at long horizons without losing the project. Adam is specific about measuring your team's hours against the goals so the money is not gone before the work is built, and about the problem every large collaboration now has, where easy access to information means twenty people arrive with twenty quick answers and someone still has to synthesize and make the recommendation. His interest in leaving deliberate room inside construction documents for later customization answers a real condition of scaling built work, since the site and the climate will not be what they were when you drew it. He also compares AI to sugar, and tells younger designers the profession is not a system to disappear into.

Chapters:

00:00 A Hollywood Hills Childhood and the Road to Landscape Architecture

10:43 Real Budgets, Real Timelines, and the Myth of the Legacy Firm

14:36 What the Firm's Founder Learned Revisiting His Own Projects

24:40 Salesforce Park: A Public Garden Seventy Feet Above the Street

30:39 The Maryland Meadow That Looks Undesigned

35:30 Hummingbird Nests, Quarterly Reviews, and Published Metrics

40:22 Why Adam Compares AI to Sugar

44:56 BIM, Shared Models, and Documenting for a Site That Will Change

51:20 Advice: Individual Agency Inside a Collective Practice

The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.

Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale

buildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level.

Connect with us at:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/

Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders

You can connect with Adam at: 

https://www.pwpla.com/

https://www.instagram.com/pwpla/?hl=en

https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-greenspan-5b057911/

Larissa Cook was studying criminal justice when she took an executive assistant job at a Boston remodeling firm. Nearly twenty years later she is president of that company, FBN Construction, a 40-person, $30 million builder working on some of the most complex homes and inner city renovations in greater Boston. The path there ran through a comment nobody should have made, and a decision to work through the night until it stopped being true.

Larissa has sat in almost every seat at FBN. Estimator, bookkeeper, marketing, contracts, project management, and now the top chair. When she was first asked to learn estimating, the estimator at the time was not enthusiastic about training her, and said so in terms she still repeats. She responded by staying at the office morning, noon and night, going home to shower and change, then coming back. She learned the trade from the subcontractors and site supervisors directly, asking how long it actually takes to frame a wall. That skill changed the trajectory of her career, and it is why she can talk about running a construction business from the numbers all the way to the job site.

The conversation gets specific about how FBN competes without racing to the bottom on price. Every client receives an itemized cost to complete report every week: original budget, spent to date, projected finish. Invoices are coded weekly, even on multi-million dollar projects, which is a significant amount of administrative work that Larissa considers non-negotiable. Her rule is direct: FBN will not spend a client's money without their permission, so there are no surprise change orders. It holds the company accountable in both directions, because being over budget becomes a conversation early rather than a document later. The transparency also has a compounding effect. Once clients see they are genuinely in control of the budget, most projects double, triple or quadruple in scope from where they began. Larissa also talks candidly about the work she cannot show, including a structure built on a client's property to replicate an art museum in France, positioned around his collection, on a street with a 24 hour police detail and no photography permitted. She covers what one wrong hire costs a team that cares, why FBN hires slow and fires fast, and what it took to establish her own authority as a young woman taking over from a well liked predecessor in a male dominated trade.

For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is a practical look at building a premium residential construction business on trust rather than price. Larissa's approach to real time financial reporting is a working model for anyone trying to scale custom work without losing control of margins or client relationships. Her framing of budget, schedule and quality as three priorities a client must rank is immediately useful in a first meeting. And the closing conversation on artificial intelligence in estimating and design is an honest exchange between two people who run companies, weighing which parts of the process are genuinely at risk and which depend on human taste and judgment that software cannot replicate.

Chapters

00:00 Sitting in Every Seat at FBN Construction

02:51 The Work You Are Not Allowed to Show

05:47 The Comment That Changed Her Career

08:20 Leading a Company You Have Worked Every Part Of

10:41 Earning Respect After Taking Over as President

15:22 Competing on Transparency Instead of Price

18:55 Budget, Schedule, Quality: Naming the Client's Priority

23:10 What AI Changes in Estimating and Design

The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.

Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale

buildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level.

Connect with us at:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/

Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders

Connect with Larissa at:

https://fbnconstruction.com/

https://www.instagram.com/fbnconstruction/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/fbn-construction

Maura Rockcastle designs landscapes by first standing in them for hours, feeling how the light shifts, how the ground gives underfoot, how a single site changes across a day. As Principal and Co-Founder at TEN x TEN, she has turned that slow, sensory way of working into a practice that treats deep attention to a place as the starting point for design, not the first line item to cut when a budget tightens.

Her path was anything but linear. She started in fine arts, running raspberries and homemade tea bags through a printmaking press, then watering the prints to grow mold and study how they changed over time. A perceptive professor pointed her toward landscape architecture, and she never looked back. She began her career the day after graduation at a renowned New York practice, working on a now-famous elevated park, then spent nearly a decade in the city at an interdisciplinary studio before returning to the Midwest, where she grew up and where her father practiced architecture. She co-founded TEN x TEN with a longtime collaborator after the two bonded over a design competition entry.

In this episode, host Alyssa Olson and Maura get into the real mechanics of running a values-driven studio. They talk about community engagement as genuine relationship building rather than a box to check, and the tension every firm knows between time, fees, and the storytelling that makes a project sing. Maura is candid about treating efficiency as its own design parameter, about the project management systems and shared digital boards that keep the studio's institutional knowledge alive, and about building a more horizontal office with a transparent salary ladder and rotating leadership roles. She also walks through work that carries heavy histories, including the revitalization of a sacred site at the confluence of two rivers, layered with cultural meaning and generations of trauma, and a minor league ballpark nested into a former industrial pipe foundry, where roughly 85 percent of the site's material is being salvaged and reused.

For designers, builders, and entrepreneurs, this is a clear-eyed look at how to protect the parts of your process that matter while still running a profitable, sustainable practice. Maura's approach to material reuse, community-centered design, and building a studio culture people actually want to grow inside gives you a lot to carry back to your own work, whatever the scale.

00:00 From printmaking and mold experiments to landscape architecture 

03:06 Early career and a decade of big-city practice 

05:26 Coming home and co-founding TEN x TEN 

07:11 What they set out to do differently 

15:05 The tension between time, fees, and storytelling 

18:29 Efficiency as a design parameter, tools, and shared knowledge 

25:59 Building a horizontal studio: titles, pay, and rotating leadership 

32:51 Dream projects and landscapes with contested histories 

37:13 Salvage as design: a ballpark built from a foundry 

The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.

Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale buildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level.

Connect with us at: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/ Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders

You can connect with Maura at:

https://www.tenxtenstudio.com/

https://www.instagram.com/tenxtenstudio/?hl=en

https://www.linkedin.com/in/maura-rockcastle-513a036/