By the time most clients call us, they have already made the easy decisions. They have a Pinterest board. They have a wish list. They have spent a year looking at backsplashes, an afternoon picking a paint chip, and three weekends arguing with their partner about whether the island should have a waterfall edge, or if that’s out of style. They know what they want their finished kitchen to look like. What they have almost never thought about - because no one has ever asked them

There is a particular kind of house I've walked into more times than I can count. The range is from a brand most people only know from food magazines. The countertops were quarried in Italy. The cabinetry came from a custom shop that bills by the linear foot at a number most homeowners would rather not say out loud. The hardware alone - pull by pull - cost what some people's entire kitchen budgets cost. And the room doesn't quite work. The proportions are slightly off. The pe

There is a moment, walking through one of Boulder’s older neighborhoods on a slow May morning, when you understand exactly what someone fell in love with - the rough-cut sandstone foundations, the leaded glass over the front doors, the porch ceilings painted in colors that have outlasted three generations of repainting. The houses in Mapleton Hill, Whittier, University Hill, Newlands, and the residential pockets around Chautauqua were built in a way that is no longer being bu