3d kitchen interior design software 2020
i'm gonna go ahead and introduce our panelists here. to my left i have rosa alvarado. she's with pmsm architects, this is a firm, that is the oldest one in california, santa barbara definitely, santa barbara yeah over 100 years old and she said have seen many iterations, and that's old for santa barbara 111 years the guiding principle of the firm that she works for as an architect is that it's dedicated to projects that enrich the community so we're looking forward to hearing you talk about
your work that you do there and have done at one of your other places here that you were connected to with dawn. to rosa's left we have dawn... ...ziemer who is from kbz architects, she's a principal architect at krueger benson and ziemer. interior designer, sorry oh, it's but it says kbz architects but you're an interior designer, all right. principal interior designer and you have, you lead a pid plus c. did i say that right? it's on it's on your linkedin
how many linkedin accounts do you have? so this is where i found out some of the information is on linkedin yeah anyway, i found on the website too that you have a background in institutional facility design and modernization projects and historically significant projects here in santa barbara, which we will be delighted to hear about as well. so each one of them has their own specialty to dawn's left we have matt beausoleil and one thing i forgot to mention is everybody here has either graduated from or taken classes from santa barbara city college they were in your seat at one time okay, so matt is with a.b. design studio
they do residential commercial and hospitality projects, and we're looking forward to hearing a lot about what you do there lastly, we have another interior designer, get it right this time, we have katie crook she's with hayward's design center. if you haven't been there before it's a really fun place to visit and she got her aa from here in interior design, right? hayward's is a fourth-generation family business, so again it's a it's an older company that's been around a long time with a lot of history, and they're all going to show you some of their wonderful work and with that, rosa, i'm going to hand it off to you
i'm rosa alvarado. i'm an architect here in santa barbara i'm a senior project architect and the market sector leader for the healthcare studio in our office so i focus primarily on healthcare design, but i also do a lot of k12 modernization types of education type works. i grew up here in santa barbara i was born in mexico but i came here at a very early age about five years old or so and i went through the local school system i graduated from santa barbara high school and shortly thereafter
went on to cal poly san luis obispo to study architecture so a five-year program there, i'm sure some of you are familiar with it, have probably attended, and i'm sure that some of you all aspire to go to that school because it is one of the best schools ...for architecture. i'm very blessed to have been able to go there while i was in high school i had a career day where a gentleman named ken krueger came to visit us and laura and i were sharing stories about ken krueger, ken krueger is the krueger in krueger benson's ziemer, where dawn sophia works now. he unfortunately passed a few years ago and so you know he was basically the reason why i continued on with my dream of becoming an architect
he offered me a job when i was in high school after having come to my high school and career day and i've worked with them for 22 years, so i had the pleasure of working with dawn for many years and about nine years ago, oh, gosh, i'm dating myself nine years or so ago i moved on to pms and phillips michelinimore architects mostly to pursue opportunities and different types of projects i was focusing mostly on education work at kdz and now i focus mostly on health care so it's just an opportunity that came and i took it, so let's see my day today involves an array of things mostly a lot of communication both verbally and
via email on the phone coordinating with our consultants. we deal with team consultants every single day on every single project our office focuses primarily on these four market sectors, however, we do other things that are kind of out of the ordinary, but basically we do civic and aquatic type projects, we've worked on the airport here some of the projects you might be familiar with santa barbara airport, this is one of my jobs kind of random they called and said can you do a livestock barn? we said sure! so we did a livestock barn of ventura fairgrounds another one of our primary markets that we focus on is the performing arts some of these that you might be familiar with are the granada of course
we did the major renovation there another local one is the music academy of the west in montecito the others are out of town i believe. thirdly, education we do daycare through university type work, some of the projects here that you might be familiar with are our psychology building at ucsb. this is the la cumbre junior high school auditorium renovation project and this is a school here, i believe it's the monte vista school in santa barbara the rest again are out of town. this is a project i worked on, it's reedly modernization and this is college of the desert entry project that i worked on in palm desert. and lastly healthcare, my market
these are a lot of the healthcare projects so i do a lot of work in hospitals, one of our major clients is cottage the other is the cancer center of santa barbara and the visiting nurse and hospice care of santa barbara hired us to do there serenity house project, i don't know if your familiar with that i know you've had experience with that... ...facility. that was my project and the reason for my move to pmsn, and that's where i started with that project, and it was just a a labor of love a lot of learning, i've never really been familiar with hospice until i got on this project and it was just quite an amazing opportunity. it's an 18 bed hospice facility here in santa barbara
beautifully set up in the hills, not far from here actually in miramonte, and just really great, one example of what i as an architect enjoy the most and that is learning new, you know, project types; getting to work closely with a client from beginning to end through construction, and then you've seen something you know, as beautiful as this complete and serves the community and that's one of the things that we do you know, projects that enrich the community, all these projects enrich the community in one way or another serenity house being one of them, cottage hospital obviously. its an essential services building so it serves our community and schools of course serve our community
aside from this full-time job. i am married and i have three sons two of which are college students. they're twins they're 19 and they're off in college in phoenix and dawn sophia, well you know, has known me long enough to, know you, know me before i had kids you know and it's crazy so we've grown up with with our kids and and i have a younger son, who is 12, who attends santa barbara jr. high school and so that's another full-time job when i was pregnant with my twins
i, i kind of panicked you know obviously knowing that i was going to have twins but more than anything i was really concerned about not being able to work and kbz was just so gracious to offer me the opportunity to work from home for a couple years while they were newborns and that was quite an amazing opportunity because with computers now in architecture in particular we deal with everything electronically, and we don't dress by hand anymore and i was able to, you know, function and work full-time shortly after the kids were born and and work from home which was really great so if you're a woman out there and you want to have a family
i want to make sure you know and reiterate, that doesn't mean that your life stops, you know, life goes on it is possible. it's a lot of work obviously but you know, i made it happen, so very happy to have had that opportunity and (how much time do i have?) okay, so what i do on a daily basis getting back to that you know i have multiple projects right now. i have a project list of close to 30 jobs at one time we have teams we have teams that help in different phases all of them are in different phases some are and the proposal phase obviously
they're not jobs yet, but their time, they are projects that we spend time on we you know, we propose on a project, sometimes we're invited sometimes we submit a proposal ourselves to try and get the job and we have to kind of prove to the clients that we're qualified and capable of providing the services for the particular job. once we get the job we go through the phases which you may be familiar with schematic design, design development, construction documents bidding and c.a. so the various projects that i'm involved with now are in one of those many phases some are in closeout, which is at the end of the job. when you do institutional type work like we do, we deal with the state as the jurisdiction for review of our projects
we don't have projects that are reviewed typically in town, so we deal with the division of the state architect for schools and ashpod for healthcare projects and when a project is complete we go through a series of paperwork and documentation and closeout to ensure that the projects get closed out with certification so a lot of follow up and responsibilities and organization is critical when you run a project. that's... it's not all about, you know, making pretty pictures, you know, it's a lot of responsibility yes again, i grew up here in santa barbara went to school here and then i was very lucky to have been accepted... immediately out of high school to cal poly. i turned 18 in san luis obispo, so i was very young
it's a five-year program when i graduated i went back to work to kbz for a while and started my examination process, and i got my license for ...to be an architect, and i am also a leed accredited professional so i have my leed certification and yeah, so the licensing process has changed throughout the years when i took it there were i think eight exams and they were hand drawing the big one was a 12-hour, continuous 12 hour
drafting exercise for the design portion and i did not pass it the first time it was very hard. it was very stressful. i ran out of time but now it's all electronic, and i think i'm not sure but i believe there's seven exams now they reduced it even more? lucky another thing that they've eliminated is at the end of the exams there used to be an oral exam and so you didn't do the oral until all of the exams had been passed and basically that was a panel of three licensed architects, you went down to la or san francisco sat in front of a panel
before sitting in front of them they gave you a set of drawings to look over for i think half hour or so it was a project and then they asked questions specifically about the project and your experience and how you would deal with certain situations so i'm licensed now. i have my lead certification and that's my educational experience leed certification? so leed stands for leadership in energy and environmental design. it's a program that some buildings have well, some buildings are certified as leed. i'm an accredited professional, so on the leed ap
but buildings get certified and the certification is basically a a point system in which you provide sustainable features in your design of a building and they can range from you know, carpet being recycled content, indoor quality, all sorts of points that you can get and there's different divisions within the leed program that add up, and there's a level that you can have the building certified at, the highest being platinum and so i have not participated in a leed project a lot of building owners
no longer really want to pursue that not only is it costly but with our codes and the requirement that the code has for title 24 energy you know requirements are so, you know, stringent as it is the most buildings should and have to be sustainable they have to have a certain, you know, lighting, you know, of natural lighting and so and so forth. so... i have done, on the serenity house project, a program through the city of santa barbara where it's built green similar point systems just a different classification of leed, which or green, you know sustainable design we had ...uhh...
cisterns on that project, some water capturing opportunities with that the lighting and the building insulation, and so on and so forth, all contributed to points for built in santa barbara so at this point. i'd like to open it up for questions. specifically for rosa right now. so does anybody have any questions i've had a passion for architecture since i was eight years old my parents had a large addition on to my home when i was little and i was just fascinated by the process i've always been very artistic so i was always interested in art and i've also loved math until i got to calculus in college but but i thought i'd used those you know qualities, and i wanted to pursue architecture, and i took drafting courses throughout my high school years
and that is what introduced me to ken because he came and spoke to my drafting class on career day and ken and my drafting instructor were really good friends and he reached out to my instructor after presenting and said hey is there anyone that's really interested in architecture that you would suggest, you know, working with us? and they suggested me, and i was lucky enough to get a job. i worked with kbz starting in high school through college. i'd come home for the holidays or summer and then after graduating well, i, like i said i'm an immigrant to this country, my first language is spanish and i grew up in this community as a female and have a family so there's no, you know,
there shouldn't be an obstacle being a woman and or of color. i feel that we have a very special you know knowledge being women, we're more sensitive to our environment and certain respects not always, guys don't get offended, but you know we we can contribute quite a bit. you know so i'm the market sector leader for the healthcare a studio in our office and from marketing all the way through production and it just depends on the flow and the current status of the project load, like i said we do have a team and so i'm constantly, you know, kind of assigning tasks and their reporting back and just making sure that the projects continually flow and you know follow-up is there
and i'm you know the contact the primary contract with contact with most of our clients so i just have to ensure that each of those projects are flowing to completion. i'm not performing all that work i can't possibly i don't even dress hardly and more but i'm just ensuring that you know our teams are on task and on time and so on and so forth so they're in different phases and so i just have to have accountability and tracking each of the project is critical (you're in charge of traffic?) a lot so, a lot of multitasking is that... that's basically what that was about? (yea) thank you rosa!
so i, um, did attend this college and i took an interior design course and i took a mechanical drafting class, and i think that really helped me kind of start to focus on where you wanted to go in my career i also was fortunate enough to be the daughter or i am the daughter of an architect and so i was brought up in that world of design i have a lot of memories of going to construction sites and i was a little kid, and i just thought it was thrilling i loved it, it felt like you were going somewhere where you almost weren't supposed to go
i remember going to ribbon-cutting ceremonies for new buildings. i had just been completed as a little kid, and i thought that was really neat so i had a real positive view of design of the design field as a kid that i by going to city college i think that's what really opened my eyes to interior design which i think is geared a bit more towards the decorative part of the design world and so that that was, you know, my passion after santa barbara city college i went to california college of arts & crafts, which is now called california arts up in the san francisco, oakland area and
it was a four-year program. i got a bachelor's there and it was a very good experience all the instructors were mainly from kind of the big bay area heavy-hitter design firms so it was there's kind of a lot of pressure because you would come up, and you would do your design and you'd present them to these people that work at gensler and hok and they did not take, you know, any excuses from you at all you just you had to perform and so the level was pretty high there so that was a good experience and so my education that was pretty much it. i didn't come on and get a masters or anything work experience, i was kind of like rosa, i was
before you... i was the, they called it the office girl at kbc. i know it... where you, yeah, like? the go-fer and so i just did everything around the office, i, before computers you had to actually drive the drawings from the architect to the mechanical engineers office or to the civil engineers, so i spent a lot of time driving around santa barbara i also got to know the inner workings of a design firm from everything from ordering supplies to running blueprints, and i knew how to troubleshoot the machine if it broke down i knew how to change the ammonia and the blueprint machine so anyway, it was kind of nice to get that footing and then when i was back up at college i got a job as an intern at a firm, actually two women who just had broken off from gensler and they're starting their own firm so it's great to have this you know very inexpensive young person to work for them and so i got thrown in at the deep end
yeah, all of a sudden like from the start i was space planning and working with systems furniture and doing color boards and all that so it was a good experience then i actually moved on and went to england and worked in london, and i worked for a really big design firm was huge and all i did was space plan just sitting there and that was the era of like you walk into these big open offices, and it was just cubicles just like, you know, as far as i could see and all these poor people are working these little cubes but there was a you know a lot of that kind of work in that era and so i've got a lot of experience there and move back santa barbara. fortunately i was able to move back here and came back to kbz and then here i am
so anyway, this is a picture of the libero theatre before the renovation which took place, i think, in 2014. our firm was hired to come in and it started out as an interiors project and their main goal was to improve the comfort of the patrons at attend to the theater, and so they wanted more comfortable seats and they wanted to add air-conditioning and so pretty quickly the project expanded to the exterior because we had to meet the ada, which is the americans with disabilities act and one of the first things you have to do is provide an accessible path of travel to the theater so the previous shot of you notice, but there was a slope up to the theater
the new design now levels it off so it's accommodating for wheelchairs, and there's a ramp that takes you up to this this is a before shot of the theater before it was renovated and so you can see it was kind of a drab and hard to tell this lighting, but and it was you know tough you all been there, but it's a historic landmark in santa barbara designed by george washington smith and lou de maria riggs in 1924 it was constructed, so the main goal is to come in fix it up, but how'd it feel like we hadn't done anything like it was still the same libereo theater just oh it's kind of got spruced up. you know. what does he do? so that this shot shows you two photos and one of the big
problems that we had to solve was how to bring in air conditioning into a theater that was not designed for that and that's a typical thing that you do as an interior designer you work with engineers because what they do really has an effect on what the space could look like if you don't especially if you don't work with them real well you have to get it all planned out so to bring air-conditioning in you need to have you know place to supply the air and then a place to return the air and it needs to be something that feels good
and then you don't want to hear it because you don't want to hear whistling when there's you know a performance going on so besides the mechanical engineer we also worked with the acoustical engineer and came up with this idea to cut a kind of a square around the beautiful coffered ceiling and then we added four that was for supply air, and then for a return air we added another grill below so this was an original grill. this is a new grill hopefully when you go in there you'll think they've been there forever, and you won't even notice the holes in the ceiling so that's kind of a typical thing that an interior designer would do working with the you know engineers
i just threw this in because it was really dirty this is the top of the columns and we noticed there are these tragedy and comedy masks up at the top and no one had seen them before and one night we're on the stage we're kind of looking around at all the stains on the walls and the theater guy had this light and we're like well was that and so that gave us this idea of like oh, we really need to light the columns because people need to see these masks so you're always looking for inspiration, and how to, you know, you see little things like that and think "okay" and then it takes you down a path
this is a crafter the renovation. we worked with ann kale who is a very talented lighting designer and so what we came up with was we use the original light fixtures, and then hid behind it really powerful new fixtures that then would up light the space and light the columns here you come in and it doesn't look look like we did much but the overall atmosphere and feeling is hopefully a lot more alive and cleaned up this space right here is for wheelchair use and that's a big focus and, you know, when you're doing layouts and planning we had to have eight wheelchair spaces in this theater, and so one wheelchair space takes up seven seats of tickets so what we came up with was a way to design a platform
that moves in where this hole is you remove the handrails and you put seats back in so that that took me like a week to figure that thing out and detail is so you know you spend a lot of time all that kind of stuff because there's lighting and you know how do you support the rail, but however you can take it out? so there's a lot of detailed drawing that i work on thanks, okay so here's it under construction, the women's restroom, and there it is during. so this is when i kind of panic i'm like "oh my god! we really tore this thing up. i hope it comes out ok" and then it came out pretty good
this is a little library at adams elementary school that our firm did the whole building and then interiors we were involved in from the start and it's a you walk in and it's kind of a warm space the it's got concrete floors the facilities guys, the guys that maintain the the campus they like that. they like, you know, easy to clean flooring so we designed all the cabinets and the ceiling is wood, but it's acoustic. so it absorbs sound this is called a... ... the design lab and school projects we work on a lot take a really long time, so when this building first was designed
it was a computer lab and then it changed to a tablet lab and then when it was under construction it turned into the steam lab which is science technology, engineering, art and math... all taught in one room so we're constantly changing and you know they're pouring concrete and we're trying to move electrical outlets but it came out pretty night the kids really use it a lot and so i met with the principal and the teacher to come up with the furniture for a new program that they've never done before so we all kind of work together to define what it was that went into a steam lab and then here it is in use it's a
engineering fair and they, you know, tons of people, crowd's use it and yeah, the similar project in washington was kind of skim through and what was different the washington campus was it has a flat roof because we didn't want to block the views of the ocean so that changed the whole look of the interior one more i guess, this is for the city of santa barbara besides school work we do a lot of work for cities and counties so within that there's a lot of variety this is the office building for the fire department, and it was the result of us first working on the fire station on carrillo street
and by going through that exercise we realized they didn't have enough space for both the firefighters and the administration which they used to be in there together so what we did the interiors are i did is we did tons of space plans to prove to the powers-that-be that no you really can't have both the firefighters and the admin in the same building so you needed that justification for them to then go out and obtain more funding to then do this project luckily they own the building it was a muffler shop for years and had really neat truss... ...trusses in the building so we wanted to keep that exposed and so then we created almost like a little village down below so and then you can see we hit all the mechanical on the top of the village so again a
a lot of collaboration with mechanical engineers thanks, man okay i'm katie i am a kitchen and bath designer here in santa barbara. i work primarily on residential projects where so far it seems that we've had more commercial and hospitality type designers and architects i've been doing kitchen and bath design since 2005. i was a student here first started in 2004 and
halfway through taking my classes another local person like myself came in and talked to our class and talked about how great it was to do kitchen and bath design, it was functional art you got to work with clients very closely you got to see it from start to finish it's something that they're going to use on an everyday basis and i like that aspect of design. and so i went back to her and asked if i could do an internship and i worked with her for about a year and a half which was incredible i got to see from the ground up
from being a type of gopher who does all the little errands to going out to job sites and working with contractors and engineers and then actually getting to do a few small designs myself with them overseeing me just to help me kind of guide along through the process, so it was great to do it simultaneously with taking classes because i could take classroom knowledge and apply it to real world which the two are very very different? a a little bit more about myself. i guess um been married for 10 years to my high school sweetheart i've lived in california and texas. i moved in 2007 out to austin for five years my husband did graduate school out there and
so i got to work at a couple of design firms in texas. it was also interesting looking back now because design aesthetics and what people are requesting in the midwest are very different from what is requested out here, so having those two to kind of position against each other is very nice yeah, oh, sara. all right okay. so how i made it i did start here at city college? i, in high school a art academy came in and did a presentation during one of my art classes and talked about interior design and prior to that i thought i was going to go become a psychology major. which is great because you actually need psychology to do this job i immediately thought this is perfect. this is what i want to do. i found a program that was in santa barbara
and came here to city college. i did the two year associate i felt like that was an important step and i wasn't sure if i wanted to continue on to get a bachelor's which as it turns out? i did not continue on to do i paired my degree here with a internship program that i did, and then i joined up with the nkba, which is the national kitchen and bath association i've taken a lot of their webinars and local courses and they require you to do continuing education to maintain your membership with them, and so it's great you keep up on new trends you also get to learn new technologies materials and things that are coming out in the industry
my experience: i have been all over the board i have done managing of kitchen design studios where we do the full scope everything from flooring and lighting, paint colors, counter top materials, the whole works you tend to work with fewer clients because you have a bigger scope which can be a good thing and a bad thing i liked it because you did get to see more of the whole project and you had more influence as to what the project was going to look like but there is a lot more stress that is going into managing a larger project. i worked at a cabinet manufacturer when i was in texas that was actually very interesting because you get to see the behind the scenes from a manufacturing perspective
you, as a designer, you're so used to ordering product you look at catalogs you know what to expect, but actually getting to see behind the scenes was very interesting. i've done retail sales and management or also known as working for restoration hardware if anybody works retail my heart goes out to you it is not my, that's probably my least favorite thing that i've ever done it's grueling, the hours, are brutal you're on your feet all the time, you have to work with the public very very closely and expectations just you know hard to meet people's expectations where i'm at now is i work at hayward lumber or hayward design center here in town. it is a fourth-generation company i like that it is sort of in between a true corporation and a family-owned company
we've got nine locations between santa barbara and pacific grove, redwood city area i do predominantly cabinetry design, but i what i do in cabinetry design influences the scope of the project for kitchen and baths. i do pretty much anything that could require cabinetry kitchens, bathrooms, libraries, laundry rooms, garages... the whole works but more often than not will have a customer that comes in they want to start a project and we either get them set up with a contractor
an architect, an engineer depending on the scope of their work so we end up incorporating our work with a lot of other trades people here in town i like what i do now because i do only sell one thing i sell cabinetry i don't have to worry about if the counter tops came in, did they come in on time? where they cut correctly? i on't have to think about if the faucets got ordered, if the lights got ordered, so because my scope is much smaller i feel like i can do a much better job for my clients and provide really good service (can we go back and address, what prompted you to put "repeat after me: i can do this?") because you do work with people and everybody's got unique personalities, and there are going to be really really good days where you come to work
and you love what you do and there's going to be days where you just don't even want to look at your phone because it's been ringing every five minutes and people have questions for you but it's worth it at least worth it for me. i love what i do so even the bad days are still ok it makes all the other good days just really nice but i don't know if anybody has seen those funny memes where they say you know this is what my mom thinks i do, you know, this is what... people think i do well this is my version of this
what people think i do versus what i really do i think if i had to guess my clients perspectives they would think i sit down and we redid their house over a cup of coffee, and we're flipping through books and magazines and pictures and there's absolutely no kids around it's quiet and they're just going to agree on everything and they have no budget. we can buy whatever we want the items will then magically arrive they fit perfectly it doesn't cost as much money as i think it's going to cost and it only took a whole weekend. i thank hgtv for that and our job is really fun which means it's not stressful at all. we just you know go through life, la la la, it's going to be great. we're so lucky we must have the best job in the world
what my job really looks like? i do sit now with people and we go through different options, but rarely what one person wants in a family does the other person really want you have to find a nice... ...middle ground you also need to find things that work for the budget, the scope, the timeline some projects you need to go very quickly some have more time for planning in cases of structural or electrical requirements
i had a kitchen here recently where we wanted to do a very large open plan move walls around but at the end of the day it required a structural post to keep your ceiling up and we had to redesign the island to incorporate it so it felt intentional and not just like a little post kind of hanging out in the middle of the room, so while we wanted to do something it just wasn't feasible to do it and that took a little bit of work with an engineer to come up with a full plan i go to job sites a lot. i spend half my time going to job sites checking in on the progress where are we at? i'm answering questions? you know, they might need to know where we're going to put water lines or
switches anything like that, and then problem-solve if needed i do a lot of paperwork, i do a lot a lot of paperwork between ordering processing paperwork at my company making sure things get built out correctly to our contractors and you have to be very organized. i have a great filing system i may be a little over organized, but it works for me and it makes it where i'm not wasting time sifting through paperwork i can quickly get to what i need and i had a point about that but to do this job you you do have to have sort of a creative mind and open mind but you do also need to be very detail-oriented. if you are bad at paperwork if you're bad at time management
it will be a struggle for you, not that you can't succeed, but you just have to work a little bit harder i also have to manage the finances and that means i need to work on getting clients, keeping clients following up making sure that things get paid for, that's how we actually you know make money as professionals and my job really is still fun despite all of this other stuff that goes with it mostly because it is functional art for me. i love the fact that people are going to use it everyday they're going to get up and cook in their kitchen they're going to entertain they can host a wedding at their house, and you know it'll get used for many many years and there is something really gratifying about watching a project go from start to finish i love watching the, you know, before pictures compared to the after and see how everything turned out
and i think that's probably the most rewarding part of my job it makes, you know, wanting to come back every day the reason i do what i do here's just one of my current projects i i maintain a house page. i'm happy to give laura or armando my link if you want to look at more of my stuff but this is a spec house that i just recently finished up within our out in the santa barbara, golita kinda area the image on the left is my floor plan that i create, it took probably two or three renditions to go through it and create a good layout that worked for them
at the end the picture on the right is what just got put on the market i guess about a month or so ago, and the house sold after about two weeks, so that was really nice. okay? people love it! and this was sort of a fun one, the, the contractor gave me sort of a parameter of colors that they wanted to stay within a budget and then let me sort of play around with it and have some, fun spec houses are one of my more favorite things to do mostly because you don't actually have a true person who's going to live there at that moment i'm trying to think if there's anything current work elsewise well as they i would take a look at the houzz page it's probably the best way to see what i have been doing and if you do have questions, you can always email me
i think that's all i have. (did you need to leave early?) i do need to leave early it's it's they will usually stage a spec house, but a spec house just means that something they're looking to sell right away it's not like a model home where they're going to have people walk through and then build multiple homes after it. in this instance it's a neighborhood of six homes they're going to build each one a little bit differently so we're going to build one finish it sell it move on to the next one this one sold like last month the second one just went on the market this last weekend and so once that one sold we'll start the next project and flow our way through the whole neighborhood
hands down the number one request i get from clients is for white-painted shaker cabinetry i get that all day long they really want to go for that coastal, especially we're in santa barbara. they want white marble they want you know provincial french oak floors, they want white cabinetry, open, airy... but also classical they want timeless problems! and, you know, their kitchens 10 by 10, but they want to put a 48 inch range in it, and you know it's going to work, its going to function great in texas you see a little bit of that and but you also see a lot more traditional rustic design a lot more wood i feel like are actually used
i feel like i see more painted cabinetry and more light neutrals where midwest i feel like i saw more... ...dark woods... ...you know, rustic wood, warm tones, just kind of a little bit different aesthetic. i guess yeah, kind of little more cabin-y yeah would say look right now. i have eight projects that are in the installation phase and then i've got about five or six that are in ordering phase that i'm waiting for them to arrive i've got another 12 to 15 that are in the bidding phase and
have gotten to the point where i am busy enough that i do a design retainer in which case i do one bid one proposal and if they like my work and they feel like i want to work with me going forward i take a retainer it gets applied to the purchase of their cabinets what's also nice about that for me is that i can kind of gauge how busy i'm going to get and so then i can put people into slots based on how much time i'm going to have available to that way. i'm not getting, you know, 40 phone calls a day you know going crazy driving all over the place, but i would say on average yes anywhere between 15 to 20 or so real active projects i do use 2020 software, i learned it during my internships here in town and
it's something you could definitely learn on the job but having that experience ahead of time will make getting off the ground a little bit easier and faster for you this, this career is great. especially in santa barbara. we're in a really unique market where people truly want to invest in their homes they want to invest in their communities, and so they're willing to put the money and those resources into the design i feel like there is a shortage of people who do what i do there's there's enough business out there so if you're able to go get an internship and work with somebody or in the business if it's the right thing for you you, you'd probably get ahead pretty fast it just... ...requires a little bit of training first
i looked at when jenna invited me to speak tonight, and i saw the topic "how i made it" my initial reaction with what i haven't made it yet actually when i was preparing for this presentation, i realized, sorry i'm gonna time myself here, that actually that i have made it, and to be honest with you we've all made it. we're all here right now, okay we're all alive and so we've all made it here tonight so i just wanted to say thank you for for being here and listening to everyone that has presented there's been some really good presentations tonight, so so i started looking back at what was important to me my career as an architect started here at city college
and i was thinking about what would i if i can jump back 17 years like what would i tell myself to follow? these are points of advice that i have, it's just not what i believe but it's it's just one person's opinion so it's not like you have to follow it. love what you do never stop learning, i recently became licenses so i just was really president when i was getting my license that the learning process never ends wear many hats, so be versatile. create create create everything you do in design... everything you do is design so even an email the way you set up. you know your closet where you fold your clothes, it's all it's all intentional design
dedicate your time to something bigger than yourself and so you'll see echoes of these points in the presentation tonight so what i did is i started by drawing a map of where i've been and you can see that it actually started at sbcc, so you've actually got the right person here tonight if you guys want to come in there's plenty of room to sit down here and like some of the people here. it was i found my first internship through santa barbara city college and i worked for james and rumen for two years with a great small little firm that did residential work james is a great person eventually went on to woodbury university from there it's a small private school in burbank that focuses on design once again to get out in the community so i think you know one thing that's really important for me is being a part of organizations and, and
dedicating my time to that, so i've joined a fraternity there and that was probably one of the best things i did was in college, besides going to architecture school i'm going to jump into my student work right now. this was a barn project in my third year of architecture i got my undergraduate degree in architecture from woodbury university. it's a five-year program and this project was you know, used sustainable materials and was meant to give back to the community so it used, you know, bamboo trusses recycled fabrics, oil drums and pallets for the floor, it was meant for storing barn equipment and what was neat about my study there is i really started to explore these neighborhoods and in the la area and got to know
you know a city that was outside of santa barbara and different for me and and how some of these projects would also start to relate to their natural environment and context and community and it was fun. i got to build a lot of stuff by hand and it brought me to other things, other ways of exploring the creative process like photography... ...writing and i got to meet a lot of great people this is after a study trip where we had to make like a dozen models in one class and so a lot of people i'm still in contact with i got to travel with them in school. this is in barcelona
and this is recently a couple years ago with my fraternity delta sigma phi, so i think it's important to put yourself out there it's not just about school that also about networking and meeting people as much as it is about the the training of school so, once i graduated while i was at school i work for a company, tom kowal group, eventually another, my first real mentor i'd say, william s. long, in pasadena, i worked for those concerns for quite some time and then once i graduated school i decided that i wanted to do more project management in architectures and so i joined the algar group architects and that's kind of where the slides pick off, or picked up with the professional work this is oaks christian middle school that i worked on
it's in, uuhm... ... thousand oaks yes, just a more apartment a little bit off there, so they took an old industrial building adjacent to their existing high school and and reused it for this middle school. this was an exciting project. i got to see from the design process all the way through construction i helped out with construction administration a lot on this project so i got to work on a lot of the visuals and then got to see the finished product in the end. i think that was really neat because a lot of times
i was doing renderings, but did not really get to see what it looked like in the end then this was kind of an interesting time wall is that the albert group because it was right around when the recession started to hit so a lot of the projects i worked on i had some amazing, this is a commercial, two commercial buildings what was interesting about that time was that we did a lot of visuals for the hopes of getting work that never materialized but in our mind it was still real, you know, we were still designing we had programs, but then there was a lot of stuff that i worked on that did get built. this is a house in beverly hills for families or single-family house. this was great because i got to manage this one from, duh from...
concept all the way through the drawing set and in parts of construction administrations that was really neat being able to have some ownership of a project and get to see it through so you know, just some of the drawings once again. it was a, you know it was fun to draw this project in fact when i started this project the owner was out of town for like three weeks, so the company, so i actually had the opportunity of getting a lot of work done and like just it was focused and really great so, so like i said the recession happened, i actually what i, in order to furlough my student loans from woodberry attended halftime at lacc for a semester, and it's once again. it was just such a fun experience learning
i took the only two classes they had left history of classical music and business 101 and , two classes i'd never take if i had the choice, but actually really enjoyed it and you know i took things from those classes that i still carry today and then i work for a friend at alloy architecture who introduced me to which i'll talk about a little bit, some house builds in mexico but i didn't stay there very long and it was kind of a shaky time. i was looking for a job i was actually unemployed for about three months i was pretty lucky because a lot of my friends didn't have jobs at the time, so
we went from kind of what i call the swinging zeros when everything was super busy. i was working 12-hour days on average and then the time where everyone was looking for work and in 2010 i started working for talisman it was a big corporate firm based out of seattle there was 1500 employees i worked out of the santa monica office to work on theme parks this is a 6000 square meter, i'm sorry 600,000 square meter project with 5 different lands in murcia, spain. i did, i was a part of the executive architect team so we were actually just kind of organizing all the designers on the project all the other architects, so it's a good example
it's project management you know when we were kind of defining the process and doing less design work, so it's just another side of architecture that's out there is kind of some of the some of the renderings? i don't think this, i realized i saw this project never got built, they started construction and it ran out of funding and then i started i actually moved back to santa barbara in 2014 to be with av design studio, its a 20-person firm here in santa barbara, we have an la office. we do commercial residential work hospitality some more expensive experimental projects which i'll go over here and then it it's funny. i haven't updated my slideshow in a while. this is the children's museum next to the train station here in town
it's built below so it just opened last weekend. i believe so definitely go see it. it's a very burkas design that we, av, designed and executed i had the opportunity to do some detailing on this project and so and it's just beautiful, it's a fun space so i definitely recommend you go see it even if it's just for the view that view is absolutely amazing the first project i worked for was actually just down the street from there, wayfarer, hostel hotel, i got to manage this project. through construction administration and it was fun because you are always designing even in construction administration you know even if it means just out of the detail by hand a lot of the stuff that was issuing the contractor which, by hand so i still end up drawing a lot which is fun
i think i'm drawing more at av than i have it any other place... ...other firm that i work for. this is, we also have a sister company for ten that designs prefabs options with using shipping containers in a great office base and even and we actually have a residential project that were using shipping containers on right now, so it's very versatile very fun we actually have two units in the back of our office that we use as a meeting room space and office space, so if your ever in the neighborhood stop by, and take a look. it's pretty, they're actually pretty comfortable that's a trade show that we did in la this is tino's italian grocery that i worked on a couple years ago while it was under construction and just showing the process of
that project from pouring concrete into the finished projects and photos that i took we also a lot of fun at the company this is our company golf cars everybody in the city great group of people once again, it's about community and that was a picture taken recently four minutes, okay? also, just a real quick you know blurb about, i'm also on the executive board of american institute of architects, santa barber chapter
and i've done through av design landmark education and i felt like the seminars series that it's just really kind of, you know, looks at it yourself and how to improve yourself and just view your life, and i felt like in the last three years i've really grown a lot, so just really thankful for this opportunity you never know where working for somewhere, where it's going to lead you i just want to say and i got my license in november of this year so it's just kind of, i forgot to include that side is kind of an important and being back inside of all really great. i love you. i love the ocean above the mountains. that's me on my one-man outrigger canoe this is a look at the natural setting so, once, and running out of time here now i'll go through this kind of quickly. through my studies
i did a lot of studies on on the us-mexico border a lot of these photos i took and i was just kinda drawn to this place, so i really started gravitating towards there in my study there was a place of real extremes, this kind of funky there's a lot of weird stuff that, you know, gets built down there and happened there and always under always kind of in process and you know it's connected to us and in a lot of ways still separated, it is a political division and so this was a project that i entered my fourth year at weber university. it was part of the acsa steel competition of the national competition for students architecture students and my partner and i actually got first place in that project. yeah and so what it was was it was taking trades from the proposed of ensenada and actually creating a zipper along
the border from california to mexico like a transit line that kind of acts as a floating free trade zone above the two countries that kind of became an autonomous zone, that kind of weaved between the two communities here , so you can kind of start to see that and create like kind of a weird kind of floating connection between the two zones and some of the details of that, i'm gonna' move kind of quickly through these some of the inspirational images we took you know the market traditional marketplaces were inspiration on this project, but okay this is another of my thesis projects, revitalizing the la river this was my 5th year, looking at this dead zone of concrete and finding a way to rehab it this is a 16-foot site model that i use building off of trash and other found objects from around the site ...chiclets wrappers...
just to show the linear nature of it this was a charcoal spray paint and mixed-media drawing that i used, also glaze or cut, that was about eight feet wide with some details and one of the bridge scenes charging some of the open spaces for public areas and creating housing and commercial spaces along this linear stretch of the river, the model that i built a lot, it was was kind of interesting time that were very, a lot was being done digitally and i was still building physical models but i continued to want to i fell in love with the city of tijuana and in just the area it was funky, a little edgy it was still connected to home and so when i got the opportunity with alloy architecture
and i am running, i probably have like two more minutes if that's ok? when i got the, i got the opportunity to do house builds down there, and i've been down there about five times since then and what we do is we give these families home ownership of their their land through a nonprofit called project mercy and usually their working families with kids 24 by 16 foot home, and we go down in one day and build the entire structure there's always kids and dogs running around. it's a great opportunity to, you know, meet new people use of power tools, the families help build the houses and other things and its a great chance to spend time with friends, that's my wife and my father-in-law
and just really change the families lives two years ago through actually one of the landmark programs we built three houses in one day with 45 people it was just amazing to change like a whole community just in one day, and i still have gone back down there for fun so water park that i want to you know do this (can students participate in that project) yeah, yeah, yeah, there's, i'll let you know i don't have any any trip schedule down this year, but it's usually in the spring or fall, weather permitting
and so just let me know. i'm always looking for people yea so, good food... never know whats going to do on down there, so so. thank you for your time we have dawn and matt here both can answer a questions for another five minutes or so so please feel free, this is the time to ask them anything about their career and advise yourself you know there is always a need and its funny, when you mention, when you had college in the recession, i was thinking, i, when i got a college there was a recession and there's always a recession, so you just weather your way through it and there, there is, and you're right a lot of
code driven requirements do then trigger projects especially with institutional projects like when we work on the schools as soon as you touch it, you trigger a lot of code requirements, so a lot of times our projects get a lot bigger yeah, i think that it's interesting that you bring up the code issues on whether it's going to continue to bring project i think it was kind of what you're hinting at whether it's always going to be a need for that i think there is but i feel like there's also been projects that i've worked on where it's completely killed the project
if there's a lot of restrictions in, especially in this community in santa barbara they are very strict with certain regulations and so i've seen a few projects that has completely vanished because the client said i don't want to spend money to do this is not the project i want so and yeah, i guess there's always going to be a need but then you know there's sometimes there's less of a demand we both seen the recession and so it took an important time like i've done. i've been really lucky because i've been pretty versatile with the type of work that i've done and so i was able to kind of... work on different things at different types of firms, and i was just kind of creative with looking for where the work was
i have heard the same thing and i was actually shocked to hear about that california has the largest number of architects of any state i believe along with like, new york but we also have a large population and numbers have decreased from what i've been told. i don't i haven't actually looked up this fact recently getting licensed that there's a declining number of people registering to be architects, and i think that has to do with part of the registration process and examination process it is a little daunting for a lot of people right now it's five exams for national and then one
exam for california which is a lot of work, and there's a lot to study for that exam was it yeah? i just know from experience. i don't know about official projections that our firm is always looking for commercial interior designers because they're kind of a rare subgroup and the way i'm seeing design continues is it's becoming a little more complicated to complete projects because, for instance in a school the tablet arms that you're sitting at that's like we old forget it, and so it's a lot more sophisticated the type of furniture that's required for schools and
that, you know, i'm starting to feel the pressure. i'm starting to do a lot more furniture projects that are complicated, like that little library at adams i had five different furniture packages within that one project because there's a library furniture and storage and so... i think that i mean this is, you know, intuition that maybe interiors would be growing because it's becoming a bit more sophisticated what we're having to deliver to our clients now i'm sure so i you know i think i i think having a degree is a big part of a field and i think a lot of the people, i've been going back to thinking about who i've worked with, i think a majority of the people that work at my office and past architectural firms that i've worked for had a degree
i think the one exception is studied people, students that are studying and we always have one or two interns at my office that i'm at right now and so that would be one exception also, you know we have an administrative staff that you know is doing billing, proposals and that sort of stuff that sometimes they don't have degrees. (what about for interior design?) well, with our firm which is architecture everyone who's working on projects has a degree and and i think that's yeah
we thought we would require that at our firm because it is (bachelors degree?) yeah, it's pretty technical what we're working on so and yeah, we do need that. that's just our firm yeah, because you (katie has her aa) no, i have a bachelor's and an interior (no, the katie that was here)
right, absolutely absolutely yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, we have actually one of our lead designers jewels from he was an architect and got his, did schooling in the philippines, and this is a talent... architecture is architecture regardless of what country you're from and and so if you're talented and yeah it's possible let's answer your question. yeah, we have we have joel from the philippines that's designing, and then we also have someone else that went to actually he moved from iran to go to school here. yeah, and he did his schooling here, but same thing
i mean, it was just like we're open to people from from anywhere really, so yeah, we're we one of our partners is from france and he's the architect of the big building under construction right now, and then we have a 301 here on campus yeah, the west campus yeah and then we have someone from the philippines and someone from vietnam you had others. oh yeah you