The Vanishing World: On Architecture, Legacy, and the Quiet Rebellion of Care

Photo by Rachel Gant - Liljestrand House, 2012

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I visited an estate sale the other day. The house, built in the mid-1970s and designed by an architect, had that rare quality of becoming a world unto itself. It wasn’t just a structure—it was an environment, a philosophy rendered in wood and glass. Floor-to-ceiling windows, tabby concrete, a small prayer room tucked by the entry, and custom doors carved with a repeating motif that echoed through the trim work and furnishings. Everywhere, you felt the presence of a singular vision—intent carried across 6,000 square feet.

Not long after walking in, I heard someone ask if it was a teardown. The question hit me like a slap. Because to me, this wasn’t just a house. It was evidence. Proof that someone once had the means, the time, and the freedom to leave a mark that was entirely their own.

Driving home, I kept thinking about what that home represented. It felt like a kind of cultural artifact—an emblem from a moment in time when it still seemed possible for someone in their 30s to shape a space so thoroughly that it became something more than shelter. It became identity.

Today, that feels nearly out of reach. Most people my age are lucky just to find a basic ranch home with intact plumbing. And even when they do, they’re not starting with a blank slate. They’re inheriting decades of half-fixes and resale-minded renovations. The gesture now is smaller: a painted accent wall, a well-placed thrift find, a moment of personality in a space that was never meant to hold one. Sometimes these gestures cohere. Often, they feel like a whisper inside someone else’s idea of a home.

Money plays a role, no question. But it’s not the only factor. The broader shift is cultural. Mass developers, HOA restrictions, building codes optimized for speed and cost—all of it nudges us toward sameness. Toward the repeatable. Toward safety. Even most architects today couldn’t afford to build the kinds of homes they once imagined in school.

And yet, it wasn’t easy in the 1970s either. Materials were harder to source. Tools were less refined. But maybe the world hadn’t yet fully decided that uniqueness was a liability. Maybe care hadn’t been priced out. Maybe a person could still make something ambitious without being treated as eccentric, or irresponsible.

That’s the generational mirror: once, someone in their 30s could build a world. Now, we inherit those worlds secondhand—glimpsed briefly at estate sales, often misunderstood, often mistaken for something disposable. We try to recreate the feeling through small-scale gestures. Sometimes we succeed. Often we don’t.

But the answer isn’t to romanticize the past. Nor is it to resign ourselves to some story of generational decline. The forces working against individual expression—standardization, economic pressure, the algorithmic flattening of taste—are real. But so is our ability to push back. The greater danger is not that building with distinction is harder now. It’s that we might start to believe it’s no longer possible.

And that just isn’t true.

It takes stubbornness. Vision. The willingness to reject every safe, resale-friendly surface the world tries to hand you. But homes—real homes—are still being made. Worlds are still being built. They might not stretch across 6,000 square feet, but they can still hold a voice, a perspective, a soul.

We don’t have to build for the lowest common denominator. We can build for ourselves—for the people we are, and for the ones we hope will one day stand in the space and feel it. That’s the quiet rebellion still available to us: not just preserving beauty, but creating it. Not because the world rewards it—but because it’s worth doing anyway.

On Owning and Operating Things

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The fantasy of freedom, the reality of stewardship

Palmer House I, 2020

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We celebrate vision. We celebrate exits.
But in between is the slow, often overlooked work of actually keeping something alive. That’s the part no one talks about—and the part that’s taught me the most.

When my wife and I bought our first house in 2015, we were 27, broke, and all-in. We did nearly everything ourselves. We got flooded. We rebuilt. And in the process, we found something larger than homeownership: a break from abstraction. From desk work. From the mental churn. A chance to move, to make, to solve. It wasn’t a side hobby. It was the beginning of something deeper.

By 2019, we bought our first two investment properties and started what became a full-fledged portfolio. I was still working full-time at YIELD, the design company we had co-founded—deskbound and drained. Getting to peel off for a day or two each week to move, to fix, to build felt like freedom. The work was tangible. Embodied. And it gave me something I didn’t realize I was missing: control.

But there’s a strange arc to building things. In the early days, you’re at the wheel, doing everything you can to get the vehicle moving. And then, at some point, you look up and realize you’re not driving anymore—you’re being dragged behind the thing, flailing, trying to climb back in.

I’d felt that way with YIELD and I soon found myself feeling the same way towards the property work: a reluctant landlord, a jack-of-all-trades juggling AC units, water heaters, roof leaks, guests, tenants, inspectors. What once felt like creative release now felt like a weight I couldn’t put down.

So we tried to outsource the burden. We hired a high-end property management firm promising a turnkey solution: maintenance, guest communication, tax compliance—everything. The pitch was seductive: automation, scale, freedom.

The reality? Less so. And honestly, I don’t blame them. The problem wasn’t their execution—it was the structure itself. The incentives were misaligned, and the added layers made things slower, more expensive, more impersonal.

I still found myself pulled into decisions I’d hoped to avoid. And worse, I started to feel foolish. Why am I paying someone to mismanage what I could do faster, cheaper, and better? Why am I handing over authority to someone who has no skin in the game—no real stake in the outcome?

Eventually, we pulled the plug. Because here’s the hard-earned truth:
There’s no such thing as a self-sustaining system. Not when you actually care.

Third parties can handle tasks. But they can’t replace presence.
They can’t replicate judgment.
And they can’t teach you what the thing is trying to tell you.

The fantasy of freedom through outsourcing is everywhere.
“Set it and forget it.”
“Build systems, not jobs.”
“Don’t work in the business—work on it.”
It’s the gospel of scale, and I get the appeal. But the deeper I’ve gone—first in our design business, then in real estate—the more I’ve come to believe that some weight is worth carrying. Being close to the work—close to the thing you’ve made—keeps you honest.

No, I don’t do every repair. I’m not a martyr, or a total control freak. But I know this: when an issue arises late on a Saturday night, I can usually tell whether it’s a nuisance or a real emergency—because I know the space. I know the systems. I know what we’ve built.

There’s a dignity in operation that gets lost in our obsession with vision.
We celebrate founders, not stewards. But the long-term health of anything—a business, a building, a marriage—depends not just on how well it was imagined, but on how well it’s tended.

That’s the difference. Operating isn’t about control.
It’s about care.

We’re now in the process of lightening the load—selling one property, listing another. It’s not defeat. It’s clarity. Owning and operating things isn’t about hoarding responsibility. It’s about taking seriously the things you choose to keep.

We don’t need to own everything.
But the things we do own—the spaces we shape, the teams we lead, the tools we build—we’d do well to stay close to them.

To understand them.
To tend them.
To stay in the driver’s seat, even if the road gets rough.

It’s easy to dream up a system that runs without you.
Harder to build one that deserves your presence.
The trick is knowing the difference.

When Shapes Us

Photo by Rachel Gant—Sweden, 2012

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Tyler Cowen, the economist known for his intellectual omnivory, has argued that every thinker and artist is, in some essential way, a philosopher of place. That is, where we come from—our geography, our culture, our soil—shapes how we think. The air, the architecture, the rhythm of local life all leave marks on our inner logic. And he’s right. The intellectual soil of Paris yields a different worldview than the arid sprawl of Texas.

But while place is powerful, it’s not the only force shaping us.

We are also philosophers of time.

Our age—both the historical era we live through and the stage of life we occupy—quietly conditions our worldview. Much of what we perceive as “our” insight, or “our” attitude, is often just the product of when we’re looking.

This becomes increasingly clear with age. When I was in college, I saw people in their 30s and 40s as dull, uncurious, preoccupied with families and finances. I chalked up many of their life circumstances to wealth or privilege: the house, the career, the sense of security. What I didn’t yet understand was that time itself is a kind of privilege.

To someone who grew up without a financial safety net, the world of comfort and cushion can seem otherworldly—like others are gliding smoothly above the terrain while you’re grinding your way through it, low to the ground, one missed step away from collapse. I sometimes picture it like this: some people move through life in a well-insulated vehicle; others are in a Star Wars-style landspeeder, just hovering above the dirt, every rock and gust of wind felt in the bones.

And yet, many of the trappings I once resented—home ownership, stable income, even emotional calm—weren’t necessarily markers of wealth. They were markers of time. You don’t see that when you’re 20 and struggling and exhausted. You see distance. You see difference. But what you’re really seeing, more often than not, is just age. You haven’t yet had the time to grow into those circumstances.

Of course, privilege exists. Wealth exists. So does luck. But we rarely account for the compound interest of time—how simply staying in the game, year after year, changes the terrain. Assets accumulate. Skills compound. Life softens in some areas and hardens in others.

This may all sound obvious to older readers. But to younger ones—especially those coming from modest backgrounds—it may feel like a kind of betrayal. How could the people ahead of you not have been born on third base? How could they possibly understand your precarious footing?

The answer is: many of them do. They were once where you are. They just had time to climb.

So yes, we’re shaped by where we’re from. But we’re just as shaped by when. The perspective of any given person is not fixed—it’s unfolding. Contextual. Temporary.

The question isn’t just where we’re coming from.
It’s when we’re seeing from.