“We need more space.” It’s the line we hear most often in a first meeting. On Monday we started our Design Philosophy series with it, and with what usually comes next: we walk the house together and find a formal dining room set for a holiday that comes twice a year, or a guest room that waits for visitors who stay a few nights a year. Meanwhile, the whole family crowds into the kitchen.

The first step is an honest room audit. Mark every room by how often it’s truly used. The rooms you walk past every day are hidden square footage, and they’re already paid for.

The second step is furnishing those rooms so they can do more than one job. The right piece lets a room change roles in a minute: office by day and guest suite on the holidays, playroom in the afternoon and dining room by seven. Sometimes you don’t need an addition. You need better space planning.

Here are the pieces we turn to again and again.

Part one: double duty

These pieces let one room hold two functions, and switch between them without a moving crew.

Part two: double occupancy

These aren’t strictly double duty. They’re double occupancy: two people or two uses stacked into one footprint, so the floor stays open.

Part three: more pieces that work twice

A few more pieces we reach for when a room needs to work harder.

When a kitchen renovation, custom build, or interior project begins, the excitement is real. You want to move fast. You want things to feel tangible. So it’s natural to reach for the phone and call the people who will actually build, fabricate, and install. But in doing so, you may be unknowingly asking the wrong question first — and in renovation and design, the sequence matters as much as the vision.

This is what we call The Order of Operations — and understanding it can save you thousands of dollars, weeks of rework, and a significant amount of stress.

It Starts With the Plan, Not the Product

Think about it this way: a cabinetry fabricator needs precise dimensions. They need to know where each run of cabinetry begins and ends, how appliances are integrated, where plumbing and mechanical elements live, and how the room flows in relation to adjacent spaces. None of those answers exist until a design professional has laid out the floor plan and made intentional decisions about how your space will function.

Calling your cabinet maker before your designer is like asking a tailor to cut fabric before your measurements have been taken. The product — no matter how beautifully crafted — won’t fit.

The Correct Order of Operations

Here is how a well-sequenced project unfolds — and why each step must precede the next.

01

Engage Your Design Professional (Start Here)

This is where every project must begin. A designer — whether an interior designer, architect, or design-build professional — establishes the vision, the spatial logic, and the document set that every other trade will work from. Without this foundation, no one else can do their job accurately.

02

Develop the Floor Plan & Concept

Before any product is selected or any contractor is briefed, the spatial plan must be resolved. Where does the kitchen sit? How does traffic flow? Where are plumbing stacks, load-bearing walls, natural light sources? These decisions define everything downstream — room dimensions, appliance placement, cabinetry runs, and millwork opportunities.

03

Establish a Design Direction & Material Palette

With the plan resolved, your designer can develop the aesthetic and material story — finishes, hardware, cabinetry style, countertop material, lighting approach. These decisions inform every fabricator and supplier who comes next. Choosing cabinetry before establishing a design direction often results in costly changes or a disjointed final result.

04

Request Contractor & Fabricator Pricing

Now — and only now — is the right moment to engage your general contractor for preliminary pricing and your cabinetry fabricator for a quote. Why? Because they are working from a real, resolved design document. Their numbers will be accurate. Their timelines will be meaningful. And there will be far fewer surprises mid-project.

05

Produce Technical & Shop Drawings

With contractor alignment confirmed and budget parameters established, the design team produces the technical drawings — cabinetry elevations, millwork details, electrical and plumbing coordination. These are the documents your fabricator and trades actually build from. Producing them too early means they’ll need to be redrawn, often multiple times.

06

Construction & Installation

With a complete document set, aligned trades, and confirmed selections, your project moves into construction with clarity. Each contractor knows exactly what they’re building, in what sequence, and to what specification. The result is a project that runs more smoothly, finishes more cleanly, and reflects the original vision with integrity.

The Design, Corda Lane Residence

The Build, Corda Lane Residence

What Happens When the Order Is Reversed

When clients engage fabricators or contractors before the design is resolved, a few things almost always happen. Cabinet drawings get produced for a kitchen layout that later changes. Products get ordered to the wrong dimensions. Contractors provide pricing based on assumptions that don’t align with the final design. And suddenly, the “time-saving” early call to the fabricator has created weeks — sometimes months — of rework.

Beyond the financial cost, there’s a creative one. When fabrication decisions happen before the design is holistic, the design often ends up accommodating those decisions rather than the other way around. The result is a project that feels compromised — not because the trades didn’t do good work, but because the sequence didn’t allow for a cohesive design vision to lead.

Our Role in Your Project

At LARC Design Co., we act as the conductor of your project from the very first conversation. We establish the plan, develop the vision, coordinate with your contractor and fabricators, and ensure that every decision — from the placement of a kitchen island to the profile of a cabinet door — is made in the right order, for the right reasons.

We also serve as your advocate in every trade conversation. When your fabricator has a question, we answer it with a drawing. When your contractor has a conflict in the field, we resolve it with a design solution. When your timeline shifts, we resequence the work. That’s the value of having a design professional at the center of your project — not as an add-on, but as the foundation everything else is built upon.

I understand why people ask this. On paper, a schematic package looks complete — it shows the primary elements, the exterior elevations, the overall shape of the project. It’s easy to look at that stack of drawings and assume the hard part is done.

But there’s a real disconnect between what a schematic package is and how buildable it actually is. Take the kitchen above from our Estrondo Residence project — at schematic, that’s a room made of blocked-out volumes. No material, no hardware, no built-in detail. Just shape.

Schematic Design → Design Development

Yes, we can generate a door schedule from a schematic package. Yes, a contractor can start pricing from it. But pricing and building are two different things — and if you hand someone a schematic package and ask them to start construction, a lot of critical questions are still unanswered:

What materials have actually been specified?

What are the built-ins, and where do they go?

How is the kitchen laid out — and what appliances is it designed around?

That gap is exactly what design development and construction documents exist to close. It’s where materials get specified, built-ins get detailed, kitchens get resolved down to the appliance, and every one of those “we’ll figure it out later” questions gets answered — before a contractor is standing in your home making that call in the field, on your dime, without you in the room.

The Resolved Set — What Actually Builds the Room

Under Construction — August, Cabinet Boxes Going In

This is that construction-document set, standing up in the room. Every carcass here traces back to a dimension on the elevation above — the same 36-inch bay, the same equal splits, the same hood surround called out on the drawing. Nothing about this was improvised on site.

So the next time you’re holding a schematic set and wondering why you can’t just build from it: it was never meant to be a build set. It’s the outline. There’s so much more that has to happen before it becomes a building — and this is what that “more” actually looks like, mid-way there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.