About Me
Writer. Storyteller. Curious Observer of Ordinary Life.
For most of my career, when people asked what I did, I had a hard time giving them a simple answer.
People sometimes assumed I was an architect or designer. Others thought I was a researcher.
I’m none of those things.
I’m a writer, marketer, and storyteller who has always been curious about people—what they do, what they create, what they believe, and how the places and experiences that surround us shape our lives.
For more than three decades, that curiosity took me deep into the worlds of healthcare and senior living design. Today, it’s taking me somewhere new.
I’ve stepped away from consulting and am spending more of my time writing personal essays and stories, working on my first novel, storytelling on stage, traveling, exploring Chicago, and following whatever else sparks my curiosity.
In some ways, it feels like a reinvention. In others, it feels like I’ve simply come full circle.
How I Got Here
My healthcare design journey began almost by accident.
In 1987, I was an associate editor at Contract magazine attending a reception at the San Francisco Furniture Mart when I met a healthcare architect named Wayne Ruga.
Wayne told me he was starting a symposium on healthcare design. I looked at the rather slight, bald man standing in front of me and said what every magazine editor says when someone tells them about a new venture:
“Send me some information.”
He did more than that.
Wayne invited me to join his advisory board and serve as emcee for the first Health Care Interior Design Symposium in 1988. About 500 people came to La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, California, for that first gathering.
And I had stumbled into the field that would define much of my professional life.
I went on to edit eight volumes of the Journal of Healthcare Design, serve as a founding board member of The Center for Health Design, and eventually become the organization’s Interim President and then Executive Vice President.
Along the way, I wrote and edited books and articles, spoke at conferences, developed programs, interviewed some of the smartest people in the field, and learned an enormous amount about how the design of the physical environment affects our health and well-being.
After leaving The Center in 2012, I returned to consulting and writing, working with companies and organizations throughout healthcare and senior living design.
What began with a chance conversation at a cocktail reception became a career spanning nearly four decades.
The Next Chapter
But careers, like stories, eventually reach a turning point.
I’ve now stepped away from active consulting. This site preserves selected articles, ideas, interviews, and other work from that chapter of my life.
I’m proud of that work and enormously grateful for the people I met along the way. I still believe deeply that thoughtful design can improve people’s lives.
I’m just ready to write about some other things.
These days, I’m especially interested in the stories hiding in ordinary life: relationships and family, aging and reinvention, travel and discovery, grief and resilience, spectacular mistakes, awkward encounters, unexpected kindness, and those strange little moments that make us stop and think.
I’ve also begun telling stories on stage. There’s something wonderfully immediate about standing in front of a room full of strangers and saying, essentially, Here’s something that happened to me. Maybe you’ll recognize a little of yourself in it.
That’s what I’ve always done with my personal essays and stories, too.
Because I’ve come to believe that the best stories aren’t necessarily about extraordinary people doing extraordinary things.
They’re about ordinary people trying to figure out this complicated, funny, heartbreaking, surprising business of being human.
And I’m still figuring it out, too.