Spatial, Digital, Tactile

I organize my work into three pillars  — Spatial, Digital, and Tactile.

They aren’t three separate businesses… they’re three lenses on the same practice, and depending on where you’re standing, you’ll see them differently.

The lens of a single project

The most common path.

Follow one project from the first phone call to the final walkthrough, and you’ll watch it move through all three pillars in sequence.

It starts digital. Before anything is built — sometimes before a site is even secured — a project lives in conceptual space.  Extensive 3D BIM models.  Renderings built to generate funding, to get a client’s team aligned, to prove a concept is worth the investment. This is architecture before it has a body.  It’s still architecture — it’s just not physical yet.

Then it becomes spatial. The digital vision resolves into a real site, a real structure, real square footage.  This is the phase most people think of when they hear “architect” — plans, permits, framing, the building taking shape.

And finally, it becomes tactile. This is the layer you actually live in.  The materials you see. The surfaces you touch. The floor under your feet and the cabinetry under your hand.  A building can be spatially resolved and still feel unfinished until the tactile layer is right — because tactile is where a space stops being a floor plan and starts being somewhere you feel something.

Digital, then spatial, then tactile. One project, one throughline, three phases.

The lens of the practice

But step back from any single project, and the pillars stop being sequential — they become parallel. Three kinds of work I take on independently of each other.

Spatial is architecture and interiors in the traditional sense — the design of built space.

Digital is branding, web design, identity systems, digital storefronts — and also the conceptual work I described above, done for its own sake. A project doesn’t have to become a building to be real work. Sometimes a client needs a vision, a pitch deck, a way to see what a space could be, and that’s the whole engagement.

Tactile is materiality and objects — not just the finishes inside a space I’ve designed, but standalone pieces. Custom cabinetry. A metal guardrail. A shadowbox built from reclaimed wood. Tactile work doesn’t require a building around it at all.

Looked at this way, the three pillars are three services, three ways someone might hire Larc, three different kinds of problems I get to solve.

Why it matters

Both of these are true at once, and I think that’s the point.

Architecture, at its core, holds all three — the conceptual, the spatial, the material — whether it’s happening inside one project’s timeline or across three completely different engagements.

When I say “digital,” I don’t just mean a website. When I say “tactile,” I don’t just mean a finish schedule.

Each pillar is doing real design work, whether or not there’s ever a building attached to it.

A design resource that started with a feeling.

Can a moment become a room?

That’s the question Found Palettes started with. Not a series concept, not a content strategy — an experiment. I wanted to know if the places that stopped me when I was traveling — the ones that felt calming, or quietly inspiring, or just unexpectedly right — could actually translate into a design direction. Into a color palette. Into a material story. Into a whole house.

I’m not a vibrant designer. That’s not a disclaimer — it’s a description. The things I’m drawn to are nature-driven and tonal: the warm end of the grays, the muted blues and greens, the colors that feel less like a choice and more like a condition of the light. I appreciate bold, saturated interiors. I genuinely do. But that’s not how I read a space, and it’s not how I design one.

The way I think about it: architecture is the framework. It’s the foundation. And the foundation’s job isn’t to compete with what goes on top of it — it’s to support it. So when I’m designing a home, I’m building a base that’s steady enough to hold everything else. The vibrancy comes from the art on the walls. The collections. The people. Those things are personal and specific — they don’t need the architecture fighting for the same territory.

Found Palettes is that philosophy made visible.

A moment first. Always a moment.

The series starts somewhere specific: I’m looking for the moments that made me stop.

Not a Pinterest board. Not a project I admired. A moment. A place where I was traveling or exploring and something about the light, the color, the texture of the environment just — landed. That stillness. That quiet feeling of this is exactly right.

Those moments were already in my camera roll. I just needed to look at them differently — not as travel photos, but as design directions waiting to be named.

Found Palettes is where that practice landed.

How a palette actually gets made

I’ll walk you through the process, because I think it demystifies something that can sound more abstract than it is.

What comes next

This series will continue to grow. Each volume draws from a specific place and a specific set of photographs. Each chapter within a volume is its own palette, its own named style, its own set of materials.

The full palette for each chapter — hex colors, material pairings, and application notes — is published as a companion carousel on Instagram at @larcdesignco. This blog is where those palettes get the longer treatment: the context, the methodology, the why behind the choices.

If you’re in the middle of designing a space and you’re not sure how to name what you’re after — start with a photograph. Start with a moment. The palette is already in there.