Before we design anything, we measure everything.

A field verification visit — sometimes called an existing conditions survey — is the moment an architect or designer walks through your home with a tape measure, a camera, and a notebook, and documents exactly what’s there. It’s unglamorous. It’s also the baseline for every decision that follows. You can’t plan what a space could become until you understand, in precise detail, what it already is.

Here’s how we approach it.

We document in layers

video first

Every visit starts with a walk-through on video, narrated as we go. It’s a living record of the space — not a replacement for photos or measurements, but a backstop. If something gets missed in the still photography, it’s usually caught in the footage.

Video also does the work that hands-on verification can’t. Crawlspaces, for instance — we’ll get a camera down there and a head partway into the access hole rather than climbing in blind. Attics are the same story: a flashlight, a small ladder, and a walk-through on camera to understand what’s happening structurally, especially when a client is considering structural work. A taller ladder always helps, and if one’s on-site, we’ll use it.

Then we photograph

everything, especially the awkward parts

Photography isn’t just documentation of the obvious. Yes, we shoot every room, every wall. But the real value is in the conditions that are easy to miss on paper: a wall that doesn’t quite align, an unexplained bump-out, a material transition, a space that can’t be physically accessed to verify. Those moments need a photograph, because no amount of note-taking replaces seeing it later.

Appliance and equipment specs get the same treatment. A photo of the manufacturer sticker means we can pull exact model numbers and specifications afterward, rather than trying to hand-transcribe them on-site.

Measuring

room by room

After the full walk-through, we move room by room — sometimes a single space like a kitchen, sometimes a grouped suite of adjacent bedrooms. Rooms with heavy dimensioning needs, like kitchens and bathrooms, typically get their own dedicated sheet.

For each space, the sequence looks like this:

From paper to model

fast

Field notes get sloppy. That’s simply what happens when you’re measuring a few thousand square feet solo. The sooner those notes get digitized — scanned and started in CAD or Revit — the better, before a “6” turns into an ambiguous scribble that could be six feet or six inches.

One workflow detail worth sharing: we use two distinct dimension styles when modeling — one for measurements we’re confident in, one for anything that needs a second pass. It’s inevitable that a space won’t quite reconcile — a foot-versus-inch misread, a missed wall, a dropped dimension. Color-coding what’s field-verified versus what needs review keeps the model honest, and makes it easy to hand off a check to someone else on the team.

The deliverable shapes the depth of the model. A simple floor plan for a client or realtor might stop there. A full as-built package goes further — exterior elevations, sections, roof plans, the whole structure modeled to the extent the field data allows.

Solo works.

Two people is better.

Field verification can be done alone, and often is. But it moves significantly faster with two people — one taking photos and measurements, one documenting. The system only works if both people stay disciplined about the checklist. That structure is what turns a pile of field notes into a usable set of drawings.

This is the part of the process no one sees in the final renderings — the crawlspace photos, the annotated sketches, the two dimension colors fighting it out on a model. But it’s the part that makes everything downstream possible. You can’t design a space you don’t fully understand. Field verification is where that understanding starts.

Organic Modern vs. Pacific Haze

The same tide pool.  The overcast sky.  The same stretch of coastline ot Point Dume in Malibu, California.

Two completely different rooms.

That’s the premise behind Found Palettes, our ongoing design resource series that pulls color stories directly from photography.  Not from trend forecasts.  Not from paint chip displays.  From moments.  From light.  From the specific quality of a place at a specific time of day.

This post is a closer look at two palettes drawn from a single photograph – Ch. 01: Organic Modern Malibu and Ch. 02: Pacific Haze – what they share, how they diverge, and why understanding the difference actually helps you design a better space.

The Source Image

Both palettes originate from the same photograph: a low-angle view of the Point Dume tide pools on an overcast afternoon. The water was flat. The rocks were wet. The sky was that particular California gray that isn’t cold – it’s just diffused, like the light is everywhere at once and nowhere in particular.

In the photograph, you can see both of these palettes simultaneously. The warm tones live in the kelp-stained boulders, the sand-colored surf foam, the bleached rock faces. The cool tones live in the water itself – that blue-gray you get when the Pacific is reflecting nothing but cloud.

What Found Palettes does is separate those conversations. One palette per chapter. Each one a cohesive design direction.

Ch. 01: Organic Modern Malibu

The short version: Warm, tonal, refined. A soft modern with texture doing most of the work.

Organic Modern, as a design style, is frequently misunderstood. It isn’t the absence of modern. It isn’t just “modern but warmer.” It’s a specific sensibility: clean lines that have been allowed to relax slightly. Precision that tolerates imperfection in the right places.

This palette pulls from the rock and surf- the warmer register of the image. The whites here lean yellow. The grays are unmistakably gray, but carry a warmth you’d feel before you could name it. Nothing in this palette is cool. Nothing is trying to startle you.

Ch. 02: Pacific Haze

The short version: Cool, layered, forgiving. A more rugged coastal sensibility built for real life.
Pacific Haze leans into the blue register of the same image – the watercolor quality of a gray Pacific sky reflected in flat tide pool water. These aren’t the navies and whites of a traditional coastal palette. They’re muted. They’re a little muddy, in the best way. Misty, layered, slightly obscured – the way the coastline actually looks on an overcast afternoon, not how a paint company would render it.

The technical origin of this palette: it’s generated from the inverse hue values of the Organic Modern palette. The Photoshop workflow is a+ 180° Hue/Saturation shift applied to the source colors, which swings the warmth to cool. But these are still colors you could pull directly from the photograph – they live in the water, in the sky, in the wet shadow of the rocks. The inversion process surfaces them, it doesn’t invent them.

How They Work Together

Here’s what we want you to take away from this: these two palettes aren’t competing. They’re designed to coexist.

A home could be entirely Organic Modern – refined, warm, tonal, controlled.

A home could be entirely Pacific Haze – layered, cool, collected, forgiving.

Or a home could be both. The two palettes share the same source image, which means they share an underlying material logic even while pulling in different directions. An Organic Modern living room and a Pacific Haze bedroom can share a hallway without fighting each other. The harmony is already built into the methodology.

What the two palettes do is give you a framework for thinking about what kind of life a space is designed to hold. Organic Modern asks: What do we want to feel when the room is at its best? Pacific Haze asks: What does the room need to absorb while we ‘re actually living in it?

Neither answer is wrong. In fact, the most livable homes usually need to hold both questions at once.

Design for the way you live, work, and imagine.

Launching a new studio website feels a little like opening the doors to a freshly finished space — one that’s been sketched, re-sketched, refined, and thoughtfully built from the ground up. I’m excited to finally share this digital home for LARC Design Co., and even more excited to introduce this Journal as a place where ideas, process, and stories can live a little longer than an Instagram caption.

As a multidisciplinary design studio, my work stretches across spatial, digital, and tactile experiences — from interiors and architectural concepts, to product design, illustration, and creative strategy. Each discipline informs the other, and this Journal will reflect that fluidity. Consider it a behind-the-scenes extension of the studio: part sketchbook, part process log, part conversation about thoughtful, design-forward living.

What You Can Expect Here

In the coming months, I’ll be sharing:

Why a Journal?

Because design is not just what we produce; it’s how we think.
And sharing that thinking invites connection, transparency, and a deeper appreciation for the work itself. Whether you’re a client, a design enthusiast, or someone simply wandering through, I hope this becomes a space you return to.

Thank you for being here at the very start.
There’s so much more to come.