Designers & Builders

Designers & Builders Podcast Dive into the stories behind the spaces we live and work in. This podcast brings together interior designers, architects, and builders from every discipline—commercial and residential—to share the mindset, process, and passion that drives their craft. We explore their journeys, from early inspirations to innovative builds, and uncover how they’re shaping a new era of design and construction. Join our community of creative pioneers and discover how a fresh perspective on building can transform environments and lives.

Designers & Builders is a business podcast hosted by Designers&Builders, with 51 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Designers&Builders hosts Designers & Builders, a business show with 51 episodes published.

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  Episode #50

  Pablo Escutia, KKC Development

  Sep 24, 202634 minS1

  Pablo Escutia wanted to be a psychologist. He ended up running KKC Development, a design build firm in the South Bay of Los Angeles that draws houses and then builds them, and arguing that the split between those two jobs was never real to begin with. A line from one of his professors stuck with him: everything works on paper. Finding out what happens when the paper meets the site is what moved him from architecture into custom home building, and it is the case he spends the rest of the conversation making. He studied architecture, did internship work at the higher end of the profession, and found the corporate world too structured for the way he operates. Smaller firms in the beach cities suited him better, where the all hands approach meant the ceiling on what he learned was whatever he was willing to put in. After five years he crossed to the opposite side and went into construction, on the theory that there was more to learn where the two worlds meet than in either one alone. Understanding design is not enough on its own for custom home building. You also have to understand the materials, the structure, the geology of a site, how the sun crosses it and what the wind does to it. Design build carries baggage in his industry, the assumption being that a firm is either good at drawing or good at building and cannot be both. His counter is that design build is a conversation where everyone involved speaks the same language, whether his team designs the house or works alongside one of the architects in town. In practice that means being brought in early, flagging the complicated detail during the design phase, and working out how a Spanish tail detail with bronze straps will weather in salt air before anyone commits to it. It is also why the firm takes on only a handful of custom home building projects a year and will sit through ten or twenty design meetings on each one. He is candid about the harder parts: inheriting the company after losing the previous owner to cancer, losing good employees before he learned to stop red lining their work, and keeping a business coach because nobody hands you a pamphlet when you open a company. For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is a clear account of what changes when the person who used to do the work starts managing the people doing it. Pablo is specific about delegation, that if someone cleared a multi stage interview then the trust decision was already made at hiring, and that the best compliment he can imagine is an employee leaving to start their own firm. He is just as specific about where custom home building is heading, toward coalitions with architects who want a builder in the room early rather than a set of plans thrown over the wall. His closing advice is to decide which kind of builder or architect you actually want to be, then stay selfless about it, because a finished project belongs to the laborers and the subcontractors as much as to whoever signed the contract. Chapters 00:00 From Architecture School to the Construction Side 03:07 Redefining What Design Build Actually Means 06:02 Balancing Design Quality, Cost and the Homeowner 07:42 Why the Firm Caps How Many Projects It Takes 10:51 Using AI So Client Details Stop Slipping Through 12:51 Taking Over a Company With Thirty Years Behind It 17:02 Hiring for Design Background and Transferable Skills 19:22 Learning to Delegate, and What It Cost to Learn It 27:01 The Future of Design Build and Bigger Partnerships 30:02 Define Your Path, and Treat Everyone on It Well 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 Pablo at: https://kkcdevelopment.com/ https://www.instagram.com/kkcfinehomes/

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  Episode #49

  Steve Larosiliere & Alyssa Olson

  Sep 17, 202628 minS1

  Ten months ago Alyssa Olson left a salaried seat to run her own landscape architecture practice. Since then she has been moving between master planning work, local residential gardens, campus work in Michigan, projects in New York and Washington, and a backlog of wood projects she finally has the hours to build. The contrast is the part she likes. It is also what makes the calendar nearly impossible to hold. In this episode, hosts Steve Larosiliere and Alyssa Olson catch up for the first time since she went independent and compare notes on what that actually costs. Alyssa is direct about the trade. The freedom and the day to day flexibility are real, and so is the work of building everything underneath them: the communication habits, the organisation, the finances, the tracking. A salaried job runs on someone else's structure, and a landscape architecture practice run solo does not. Steve walks through a single day on his own side of the business, from a coffee shop he is bidding with a general contractor partner, where the answer turned out to be charging for a pre-construction agreement instead of guessing at the scope, to an exterior renovation where the concrete came back the wrong colour and somebody has to be told to redo it. The conversation then turns to a question neither of them has finished answering. Steve has been working out what his artistic point of view is, the way he would ask it of a painter, and he puts it to Alyssa plainly: with hundreds of thousands of people having moved through things she designed, what is her gift to them. Her answer is specific. The basics are non negotiable, the programming, the circulation, the stormwater, the paving and seating and lighting and planting that landscape architecture has to resolve before anything else. The craft lives in the small custom moments layered inside them, at any budget, including the affordable housing she has done a great deal of. On a plaza next to housing in San Francisco, built over an old rail line, she took one section of I beam and made it an armrest, a splash block for a rainwater leader, an edge detail and the gravel back for planting. One material, sliced and diced, doing four jobs. For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is an unusually candid hour on independent landscape architecture and on the middle of a transition rather than the tidy version told afterwards. It covers getting paid to learn the work you eventually want to own for yourself, why public RFPs are often written with a team already in mind, and why knowing people in the places you want to work matters more than the proposal does. It ends somewhere neither of them planned. Talking about how artists show their work, they arrive at the idea of an exhibition, a room where the designers and builders they have interviewed come together, put the details behind their projects on the table, and say what went wrong and what they learned. They notice out loud that they have just designed something. Chapters 00:00 Ten Months Into an Independent Practice 01:52 What the Freedom Actually Costs 02:52 A Coffee Shop Bid and a Pre-Construction Agreement 05:11 The Wrong Colour Concrete and the Last 20 Percent 07:44 Trading a Salaried Seat for Flexibility 09:24 Getting Paid to Learn the Work You Want to Own 13:14 Building Teams and Chasing Public RFPs 14:34 What Is Your Artistic Point of View 19:51 Custom Moments Inside the Basic Requirements 22:17 Designing an Exhibition Community for Designers and Builders 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

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  Episode #46

  Keita Turner, Keita Turner Design

  Aug 26, 202638 minS1

  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/

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  Episode #45

  Steve Duncan, BŌK Modern

  Aug 19, 202646 minS1

  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/

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  Episode #44

  Adam Greenspan, PWP Landscape Architecture

  Aug 12, 202655 min

  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/

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