Designers & Builders

Patricia Algara came to landscape architecture through feminism, not through drafting tables, even though four generations of architects preceded her. She founded BASE Landscape Architecture in the wreckage of a recession, with one project, one collaborator, and an office in an abandoned building. Nearly two decades later the firm is ten people, most of them women, most of them immigrants.
She grew up in Mexico in the 1980s surrounded by architects and never once pictured herself among them. Her undergraduate degree was in Latin American Studies, and her first job was reading grant proposals from women around the world at a feminist grantmaking organization in San Francisco. The same pattern surfaced in proposal after proposal: polluted rivers, unsafe streets, unequal access to resources. At a feminist gathering in Costa Rica, a prominent organizer said what was needed was to put every architect on a boat, sail port to port, and show them how cities are not built. Patricia recognized the problem immediately and also recognized that solving it was not an architect's job. It took a friend's offhand suggestion, and a dinner with a landscape architect she had never heard of, before she found the profession that fit.
Alyssa Olson and Patricia have collaborated on a mixed use project in the Mission, so this conversation moves quickly past the surface. They get into designing play spaces that children can reinvent daily, and why a structure that is not explicitly a castle becomes a castle, then a spaceship, then something else. They cover the shift away from metal and plastic toward sand, mulch, boulders and gardens in daycare environments, and the work of convincing caretakers that children getting dirty is the point. Patricia explains why the firm brought irrigation design in house, both as a hedge against the next downturn and as a way to treat water as something to slow, sink, spread and reuse rather than merely pipe. She describes ten years of returning every other month to a median that had been under grass for fifty years, hard clay that nothing could burrow into, until four bumblebee nests appeared. She is candid about AI and BIM, the water cost of the technology, and the expense of staying current as a small firm.
For designers, builders and firm owners, the useful thread here is how a small landscape architecture practice builds durability without abandoning conviction. Patricia treats portfolio diversification as survival, having started a firm in a recession, and she has structured the practice so passion projects live under a nonprofit umbrella and staff can pursue their own interests inside it. She has borrowed governance ideas from a firm that gave nature a seat among its trustees. She lets her team work from Italy or Bulgaria or wherever family is. And she is assembling a book of licensure stories from Latinas in landscape architecture, aiming to publish on International Women's Day 2027. Her advice for anyone earlier in the path is four words long: there is no space to play small.
Chapters:00:00 Coming to Landscape Architecture Through Feminism08:05 Founding a Landscape Architecture Firm in a Recession11:04 Designing Play Spaces Children Can Reinvent16:38 Diversifying the Portfolio to Stay Recession Proof18:12 Bringing Water and Irrigation Design In House22:37 Giving Nature a Seat on the Board23:57 Bees, Healing, and Designing for Habitat27:32 Ten Years of Watching a Median Come Back39:29 AI, BIM, and the Cost of Staying Current47:25 Latinas in Landscape Architecture
The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.
Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scalebuildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level.
Connect with us at:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders
You can connect with Patricia at:https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricia-algara-pla-fasla-95325626/https://www.baselandscape.com/https://www.instagram.com/base_landscape/

Keita Turner put her project types and her budget range on her website, and the phone went quiet. She had decided her studio would no longer take the single bathroom or the paint colour consultation, and she knew going in what that would cost her. It is one of the more honest accounts of raising a minimum you will hear from anyone running an interior design business, because she does not skip the part where the referrals dried up.
 
Keita is President and Creative Director of Keita Turner Design, running her interior design business between New York and St. Louis on a look she calls enduring, fashionably classic. Her background is in fashion, and it shapes where she starts. Not with the path of the sun across a site, but with texture, colour and pattern, assembling a room the way a tailor assembles a bespoke wardrobe, holding the classic against the fashionable. She is also a researcher by nature. Invited to design a window in a former department store on Madison Avenue, a project in fashion's own territory she had wanted for years, she built the scheme around her great grandmother's indigenous heritage and its principle that whatever is taken from the earth is replenished. The circle became the motif, in villages and baskets, in flowers and artwork, and finally in a rug of jute woven circles fixed to the ceiling.
 
The conversation gets specific about pricing and positioning. Early on Keita charged travel time for work outside her area, until a client questioned whether that was fair and she felt bad enough to drop it for years. Then an out of state client from the financial sector asked why she was not charging travel time, since consultants bill for their time as a matter of course. What she took from it was not about the fee. It was that the first client had never been the right client. She is equally direct that a portfolio attracts what it projects, and that she spent a stretch producing work more traditional than she actually is, which brought more of the same. Show houses and pop ups became the way out, letting her work with artisan pieces and serious art before the clients at that level arrived. Her filter now is an eight page questionnaire on the colours, periods and furnishings a client likes and dislikes, on the reasoning that anyone unwilling to fill it in has answered a different question.
 
For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is a working account of moving a practice upmarket without a rebrand or a windfall. The commercial argument and the creative one turn out to be the same: you cannot tell a client's story in one room, so a scope threshold protects the work as much as the margin. Her approach to staggering projects so no two sit in the same phase is immediately useful to any boutique studio juggling multi state jobs, and her test for a finished room, that it should never look like a sterile, perfect showroom, is a standard worth borrowing. Anyone growing an interior design business on referrals will recognize the trap she names: keep saying yes to fragments, and fragments become the pipeline.
 
Chapters:
00:00 Growing an Interior Design Business Beyond New York
05:01 Learning to Say No to Partial Projects
08:11 Putting the Budget Range on the Website
09:35 The Travel Time She Stopped Charging For
13:45 Show Houses and the Portfolio You Want
15:09 Why One Room Cannot Tell a Story
18:31 The Eight Page Client Questionnaire
24:40 Bringing the Client's Travels Into the Home
29:03 The Madison Avenue Window and the Circle
32:30 Staying Boutique on Multi State Projects
 
The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.
 
Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale
buildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level.
 
Connect with us at:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/
Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders
 
You can connect with Keita at:
https://www.keitaturnerdesign.com/
https://www.instagram.com/keitaturnerdesign/
 

Steve Duncan decided to become an architect at fourteen. He graduated into the 2011 recession, watched all but four people in his class fail to land design work of any kind, and took a lighting design job instead. Fifteen years later he is Creative Design Lead at BŌK Modern, and he treats that detour as the reason he is good at the job rather than a delay on the way to it.
 
The route ran from lighting design back into architecture, then into real estate development and home building, then three years running his own business. One line from his first design studio has followed him the whole way. A professor quoted Socrates: there is no solution, seek it lovingly. At the time, with a black and white and fairly type A mindset, he thought it was nonsense. Now he describes design as a field with many right answers, where the real work is championing your perspective and then defending it, to colleagues, to general contractors, to developers, to installers, over and over, until the thing gets built. He is a trained architect who crossed to the fabrication side, and the move handed him something architecture firms rarely have: direct access to the people whose hands are actually on the work.
 
Much of the conversation sits at the seam between design intent and what a shop can physically make. At BŌK Modern he works in perforated and folded metal, where adding bends stiffens a panel enough to pull structural steel out of a job and take cost with it, and where one panel can read as a pattern at freeway speed then reveal moiré effects to anyone who slows down and stands close. He is direct about aluminum moving week to week under tariffs, and his answer is to walk into every project with value engineering options already in his back pocket, named upfront instead of sprung later. He argues architecture firms should bring fabricators in early, before hours disappear into detailing something that was never going to be built the optimal way. He is blunt about construction administration being a small slice of fee and badly undervalued. He sketches by hand before opening Revit or SketchUp, because modelling too early drains the energy out of an idea.
 
For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is a clear look at the handoffs where a project quietly loses its intent. His framing of design as a mindset rather than a title is immediately useful to anyone briefing an installer or a general contractor. His observation about conversation size, that two or three people make decisions while ten or twenty cover themselves, will be recognised by anyone whose week is mostly meetings. He also makes a specific call on the next five to ten years: the silos collapse, drawing production gets easier, and architecture firms, fabricators and financing start working concurrently rather than passing a baton down the line. For architecture firms trying to get a braver detail built, his advice is to assemble the technical team while the idea is still moving.
 
Chapters:
00:00 Deciding to Be an Architect at Fourteen
03:57 There Is No Solution, Seek It Lovingly
05:07 Defending a Design Vision at Every Handoff
07:39 Design Is a Mindset, Not a Title
09:38 Why Construction Administration Gets Undervalued
11:13 Reading Metal at Freeway Speed and Up Close
14:46 Aluminum, Tariffs, and Value Engineering
17:44 Bringing Fabricators In Before the Details Are Set
27:46 Meeting Size, Process, and Where AI Fits
35:15 Ornament, Texture, and Dappled Light
 
The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.
 
Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale
buildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level.
 
Connect with us at:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/
Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders
 
You can connect with Steve at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-duncan-aia/
 

Seventy feet above downtown San Francisco, on the roof of a transit center, there is a half mile loop of path where strangers stop to point at leaves and name species out loud. Adam Greenspan, partner and design director at PWP Landscape Architecture in Berkeley, California, helped design that park, and he still goes back four times a year to look at the trees. This conversation with host Alyssa Olson is about running a landscape architecture practice at the speed trees actually grow.
 
Adam grew up in the Hollywood Hills, hiking native California hills and streams behind the house while going to school in the middle of the city. From kindergarten through high school he spent every Friday afternoon with a private art teacher, and toward the end of that stretch he built a pond and an aviary for songbirds in her backyard. She was the first person to say landscape architecture to him, and he did not take the advice for years. He studied studio art and sociology in college, with a work study job in the campus greenhouse, then moved to San Francisco to make art and paid for it at a retail nursery, where he became a certified California nursery person and handled the wholesale buying. A summer career discovery program in 1997, an internship at a San Francisco landscape architecture firm, and graduate school did the rest.
 
The real subject of this episode is time. Adam is direct about the myth that attaches to a legacy firm: people assume projects arrive at PWP with soft budgets and open timelines, and he says that has never been true. The fastest runs about three years, many run seven, ten or twenty. What changed the firm's thinking was its founder going back to work he had built thirty, fifty and sixty years earlier and finding that the trees, not the hardscape and pattern he was known for, were the strongest thing left standing. On Salesforce Park, Adam corrects the record: it is a public park built for an intergovernmental agency and the city of San Francisco, and Salesforce holds the naming rights. PWP still returns quarterly for maintenance review, pruning waited when five hummingbird nests appeared, and the park's performance is published through a national case study program that paired the firm with a university research team. At an art foundation and sculpture park in Maryland, close to 300 acres of demolished housing sites and mown pasture became forest and native meadow, and the arrival sequence walks visitors five minutes through habitat before they reach any art.
 
For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is a practical education in working at long horizons without losing the project. Adam is specific about measuring your team's hours against the goals so the money is not gone before the work is built, and about the problem every large collaboration now has, where easy access to information means twenty people arrive with twenty quick answers and someone still has to synthesize and make the recommendation. His interest in leaving deliberate room inside construction documents for later customization answers a real condition of scaling built work, since the site and the climate will not be what they were when you drew it. He also compares AI to sugar, and tells younger designers the profession is not a system to disappear into.
 
Chapters:
00:00 A Hollywood Hills Childhood and the Road to Landscape Architecture
10:43 Real Budgets, Real Timelines, and the Myth of the Legacy Firm
14:36 What the Firm's Founder Learned Revisiting His Own Projects
24:40 Salesforce Park: A Public Garden Seventy Feet Above the Street
30:39 The Maryland Meadow That Looks Undesigned
35:30 Hummingbird Nests, Quarterly Reviews, and Published Metrics
40:22 Why Adam Compares AI to Sugar
44:56 BIM, Shared Models, and Documenting for a Site That Will Change
51:20 Advice: Individual Agency Inside a Collective Practice
 
The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.
 
Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale
buildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level.
 
Connect with us at:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/
Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders
 
You can connect with Adam at: 
https://www.pwpla.com/
https://www.instagram.com/pwpla/?hl=en
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-greenspan-5b057911/

Larissa Cook was studying criminal justice when she took an executive assistant job at a Boston remodeling firm. Nearly twenty years later she is president of that company, FBN Construction, a 40-person, $30 million builder working on some of the most complex homes and inner city renovations in greater Boston. The path there ran through a comment nobody should have made, and a decision to work through the night until it stopped being true.
 
Larissa has sat in almost every seat at FBN. Estimator, bookkeeper, marketing, contracts, project management, and now the top chair. When she was first asked to learn estimating, the estimator at the time was not enthusiastic about training her, and said so in terms she still repeats. She responded by staying at the office morning, noon and night, going home to shower and change, then coming back. She learned the trade from the subcontractors and site supervisors directly, asking how long it actually takes to frame a wall. That skill changed the trajectory of her career, and it is why she can talk about running a construction business from the numbers all the way to the job site.
 
The conversation gets specific about how FBN competes without racing to the bottom on price. Every client receives an itemized cost to complete report every week: original budget, spent to date, projected finish. Invoices are coded weekly, even on multi-million dollar projects, which is a significant amount of administrative work that Larissa considers non-negotiable. Her rule is direct: FBN will not spend a client's money without their permission, so there are no surprise change orders. It holds the company accountable in both directions, because being over budget becomes a conversation early rather than a document later. The transparency also has a compounding effect. Once clients see they are genuinely in control of the budget, most projects double, triple or quadruple in scope from where they began. Larissa also talks candidly about the work she cannot show, including a structure built on a client's property to replicate an art museum in France, positioned around his collection, on a street with a 24 hour police detail and no photography permitted. She covers what one wrong hire costs a team that cares, why FBN hires slow and fires fast, and what it took to establish her own authority as a young woman taking over from a well liked predecessor in a male dominated trade.
 
For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is a practical look at building a premium residential construction business on trust rather than price. Larissa's approach to real time financial reporting is a working model for anyone trying to scale custom work without losing control of margins or client relationships. Her framing of budget, schedule and quality as three priorities a client must rank is immediately useful in a first meeting. And the closing conversation on artificial intelligence in estimating and design is an honest exchange between two people who run companies, weighing which parts of the process are genuinely at risk and which depend on human taste and judgment that software cannot replicate.
 
Chapters
00:00 Sitting in Every Seat at FBN Construction
02:51 The Work You Are Not Allowed to Show
05:47 The Comment That Changed Her Career
08:20 Leading a Company You Have Worked Every Part Of
10:41 Earning Respect After Taking Over as President
15:22 Competing on Transparency Instead of Price
18:55 Budget, Schedule, Quality: Naming the Client's Priority
23:10 What AI Changes in Estimating and Design
 
The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.
 
Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale
buildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level.
 
Connect with us at:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/
Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders
 
Connect with Larissa at:
https://fbnconstruction.com/
https://www.instagram.com/fbnconstruction/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/fbn-construction

Maura Rockcastle designs landscapes by first standing in them for hours, feeling how the light shifts, how the ground gives underfoot, how a single site changes across a day. As Principal and Co-Founder at TEN x TEN, she has turned that slow, sensory way of working into a practice that treats deep attention to a place as the starting point for design, not the first line item to cut when a budget tightens.
Her path was anything but linear. She started in fine arts, running raspberries and homemade tea bags through a printmaking press, then watering the prints to grow mold and study how they changed over time. A perceptive professor pointed her toward landscape architecture, and she never looked back. She began her career the day after graduation at a renowned New York practice, working on a now-famous elevated park, then spent nearly a decade in the city at an interdisciplinary studio before returning to the Midwest, where she grew up and where her father practiced architecture. She co-founded TEN x TEN with a longtime collaborator after the two bonded over a design competition entry.
In this episode, host Alyssa Olson and Maura get into the real mechanics of running a values-driven studio. They talk about community engagement as genuine relationship building rather than a box to check, and the tension every firm knows between time, fees, and the storytelling that makes a project sing. Maura is candid about treating efficiency as its own design parameter, about the project management systems and shared digital boards that keep the studio's institutional knowledge alive, and about building a more horizontal office with a transparent salary ladder and rotating leadership roles. She also walks through work that carries heavy histories, including the revitalization of a sacred site at the confluence of two rivers, layered with cultural meaning and generations of trauma, and a minor league ballpark nested into a former industrial pipe foundry, where roughly 85 percent of the site's material is being salvaged and reused.
For designers, builders, and entrepreneurs, this is a clear-eyed look at how to protect the parts of your process that matter while still running a profitable, sustainable practice. Maura's approach to material reuse, community-centered design, and building a studio culture people actually want to grow inside gives you a lot to carry back to your own work, whatever the scale.
Chapters
00:00 From printmaking and mold experiments to landscape architecture 
03:06 Early career and a decade of big-city practice 
05:26 Coming home and co-founding TEN x TEN 
07:11 What they set out to do differently 
15:05 The tension between time, fees, and storytelling 
18:29 Efficiency as a design parameter, tools, and shared knowledge 
25:59 Building a horizontal studio: titles, pay, and rotating leadership 
32:51 Dream projects and landscapes with contested histories 
37:13 Salvage as design: a ballpark built from a foundry 
 
The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.
 
Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale buildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level.
 
Connect with us at: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/ Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders
 
You can connect with Maura at:
https://www.tenxtenstudio.com/
https://www.instagram.com/tenxtenstudio/?hl=en
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maura-rockcastle-513a036/

Gary Fusselman cashed in his retirement, waited two days after his daughter's wedding, and launched Precision Millwork out of a shared shop in Utah. In this episode of the Designers and Builders Podcast, Gary sits down with host Alyssa Olson to share how thirty plus years in the industry taught him that building a great door and building a great business require the same thing: precision, patience, and a team that rallies when it counts.
Gary's journey through the world of millwork started with a red oak table his dad built in high school. From there, he worked his way through high production pine mills, co-founded a company with his brother, and eventually landed in Utah's custom millwork scene, where he discovered a whole new level of craft. A mentor with forty years of antique furniture restoration experience showed him the artisan side, while a push into sales taught him the business side he never knew he was missing. When the time came to start Precision Millwork, Gary brought both worlds together and built a shop where five-axis CNC technology meets old world joinery.
Gary and Alyssa dig into how Precision Millwork balances technology and tradition, from parametric CNC programming that cuts parts to perfection to sourcing the best rift and plain sliced white oak on the market. He talks about the realities of exterior wood doors, why American impatience with aging wood creates color matching headaches, and what he learned at a recent door and window show in Germany that lit a fire under his approach. The conversation also gets honest about the painful lessons of overselling, the systems Gary built to never repeat that mistake, and how losing a key team member revealed the true strength of his crew.
Chapters
00:00 A Red Oak Table and Falling in Love with Wood
06:31 Blending Five-Axis CNC with Old World Joinery
15:37 Planning Up Front: The Seven Ps
26:09 Scaling the Team and Operations
37:14 Moving to 30,000 Square Feet
42:29 Raving Fans, Adaptability, and Future Proofing
48:51 Most Challenging Millwork Projects
The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.
 
Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale 
buildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level.
 
Connect with us at: 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/
Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders
 
You can connect with Gary at:
https://precisionmillworkutah.com/
https://www.instagram.com/precisionmillworkutah/?hl=en
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-fusselman-6359969a
 

Jaya Kader has spent decades building luxury homes in Miami, but a calling back to Costa Rica changed everything. In this episode of the Designers and Builders Podcast, Jaya sits down with host Alyssa Olson to share how regenerative design became not just her practice, but her philosophy for life.
Jaya is the founder and principal of KZ Architecture and the creator of Regen Design Lab, an arm of her practice dedicated to projects that support human evolution and planetary well-being. Born and raised in Costa Rica, she came to the United States for college and built a career designing high-end residential projects in Miami, including the city's first LEED-certified home. But after years of feeling a growing disconnect between luxury development and the values she held, a pivotal return to Costa Rica in 2020 set her on a path to regenerate herself first, and then her entire approach to design.
Jaya and Alyssa dig into what regenerative design actually means, not as a checklist or certification, but as a foundational shift in why we design. Jaya explains how her work moved from sustainability to regeneration through curating panels for the GSD's Design Impact initiative, where she connected with Indigenous leaders, circular economists, and regenerative planners like Walter Meyer of Local Office. She shares her coherence protocol, an alternative to traditional kickoff meetings that uses sensory meditations, land-based connection, and relational governance to align project stakeholders before a single line is drawn. The conversation also touches on the role of women in architecture, where only 10% hold leadership positions globally yet 63% lead in sustainable design, and what that signals about feminine intuition driving the profession forward.
Whether you are rethinking your own practice, exploring regenerative principles, or simply questioning the systems you serve, this episode offers a deeply personal and philosophical perspective on what it means to co-create with the land rather than impose upon it.
Chapters
00:00 Growing Up in Costa Rica and the Pura Vida Mentality
06:20 What Regenerative Design Really Means
12:25 Collaborating with Walter Meyer and Design Impact
17:55 Sustainability vs. Regeneration: The Why, Not Just the What
28:05 From LEED to Intuitive Sustainable Practice
34:47 How COVID Cracked Open the Profession
40:44 The Coherence Protocol: An Alternative to Kickoff Meetings
47:00 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Buckminster Fuller, and the Dalai Lama
58:33 The Future of Regenerative Design
1:01:33 Architecture as Legacy vs. Architecture as Monument
The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.
 
Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale 
buildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level.
 
Connect with us at: 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/
Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders
 
You can connect with Jaya at:
https://kzarchitecture.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaya-kader/
https://www.instagram.com/jayakader/

MeLinda Kann did not plan on becoming a millwork specialist. She went to school for teaching, then theater design, then interior design, and somewhere along the way, a drafting internship at a cabinet shop changed everything. In this episode of the Designers and Builders Podcast, host Steve Larosiliere sits down with the founder of MeLinda K Design Studio to talk about what it really takes to build a design business from scratch, why millwork is the most expensive and most permanent element of any project, and how she learned to stop building someone else's dream and start building her own.
MeLinda's path was anything but linear. She first tried going solo in 2003, got overwhelmed by taxes and business processes, and handed her certificate back to New York. She spent the next 16 years working for custom shops and luxury firms, learning drafting engineering and millwork from the inside out, and fighting for respect on job sites where she was constantly mistaken for the assistant. The turning point came when a repeat client asked her a simple question: your boss went out on his own, so why not you? By 2019, MeLinda had launched MeLinda K Design Studio, and she has not looked back.
The conversation dives deep into the gap between being a great designer and running a profitable business. MeLinda talks openly about the two years it took to realize her pricing was completely wrong, the fatigue of pouring passion into someone else's name, and the moment her accountant told her she had tripled not just revenue but design fees. She breaks down how she structures flat-fee contracts with built-in disclaimers for project delays, why she can estimate millwork costs on the spot, and how her ability to produce her own shop drawings earns immediate trust from builders and GCs. She and Steve also get into the concrete ceiling women face in construction, the illusion of success on social media, and why the designers who last are the ones who invest in business education, not just design skills.
Chapters:
00:00 From Teaching to Theater to Interior Design 
03:46 The Concrete Ceiling Women Face in Construction 
08:13 Navigating New York City Permitting and Project Timelines 
12:43 Flat Fees, Disclaimers, and Protecting Your Time 
17:48 The Millwork Maven Course: Empowering Designers 
23:21 The Brooklyn Heights Show House and Scaling Through Reputation 
29:00 Dream Project: A Boutique Hotel from the Ground Up 
32:09 Cash Flow, Long Projects, and What Keeps Her Up at Night 
40:01 Brainstorm: Using AI to Multiply Your Brand 
48:14 Advice: Do Not Give Up, Strengthen the Business
The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.
 
Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale 
buildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level.
 
Connect with us at: 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/
Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders
You can connect with MeLinda at:
www.melindakdesign.com
https://www.instagram.com/melindakdesign/
https://www.facebook.com/MeLindaKDesign/
 

Meghan Talarowski has spent the last decade proving that Playgrounds can be so much more than plastic slides and rubber mats. In this episode of the Designers and Builders Podcast, host Alyssa Olson sits down with the founder and executive director of Studio Ludo to talk about research-driven play design, why half the people in Playgrounds are not children, and what it actually takes to build public spaces that invite joy across the entire lifespan.
Meghan's path started in architecture. She grew up in rural Northern California climbing mountains, trees, and creek beds, and did not realize how rare that kind of childhood was until she moved to the South Side of Chicago for architecture school. That gap between her own experience and what she saw in underserved communities set her on a course that led through the Trust for Public Land, a master's in landscape architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, and a six-month move to London that changed everything. There, she studied 16 Playgrounds and observed over 16,000 people, publishing findings that landed on the cover of the New York Times and launched Studio Ludo as a nonprofit dedicated to building better play through research, design, and advocacy.
The conversation goes deep into what the research actually reveals. Mature tree canopy is the single biggest driver of Playground use, more than any piece of equipment. Proximity to home determines whether families show up at all. Children are aging out of conventional Playgrounds by age seven or eight. And counterintuitively, kids who take developmentally appropriate physical risks in childhood sustain fewer injuries across their lifetimes. Meghan breaks down how Studio Ludo uses these findings to design spaces that welcome everyone, from toddlers to bird watchers to grandparents who cannot resist a 30-foot slide. She and Alyssa also explore the eight senses of play, including proprioceptive, vestibular, and interoceptive, and why physical movement is foundational to mental health, social-emotional development, and long-term resilience.
For designers, landscape architects, and anyone who cares about public space, this episode is a challenge to rethink what play looks like and who it is for. Meghan's message is clear: you cannot design a space that invites playfulness if you do not have playfulness in your own life, and you cannot build resilient communities without giving people real places to move, take risks, and feel joy.
Chapters:
00:00 From Rural California to Architecture School on the South Side
02:44 Becoming a Designer and a Researcher at the Same Time
04:42 Moving to London and Discovering a Different Kind of Playground
09:40 Creating Great Places to Stay, Not Just to Play
15:39 Play Crumbs, Master Plans, and Playable Moments
17:35 Pushing the Play Safety Guidelines to Expand Who Can Play
24:16 Why Playfulness in Process Matters for Designers
28:02 The Eight Senses of Play and Why Movement Is Mental Health
34:04 Risk, Resilience, and Letting Kids Learn by Falling
41:44 What Is on the Horizon for Studio Ludo
48:58 Advice: Stay True to What Lights You Up
 
The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.
 
Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale 
buildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level.
 
Connect with us at: 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/
Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders
 
You can connect with Meghan at:
https://www.studioludo.org/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/meghanpecaut/
https://www.instagram.com/studio.ludo/