Birthing a Design Practice with Many Voices

It didn’t begin with a business plan.

It began with a feeling.

A quiet realization that the work I wanted to do — the architecture I wanted to practice — wouldn’t quite fit into the molds that already existed. I wasn’t just trying to start a firm. I was trying to build something that could carry more than drawings and deadlines. I wanted to create a design practice that could speak in multiple voices — through space, through story, through objects — and still feel like one clear, resonant truth.

This is how Architecture Speaks Volumes was born.

Listening for a New Kind of Practice

As a trained architect, I’ve spent years learning how to think spatially — how to listen to a site, a material, a brief. But what school never quite teaches you is how to listen to yourself, or how to design a life that feels as intentional as the buildings you create.

I began to sense that I wanted more than project cycles and client calls. I wanted a practice that could carry personal memory, cultural complexity, and emotional resonance. I wanted space to write, to reflect, to share. I wanted a studio where slow design, sensory experience, and story were just as central as structure and form.

That’s where the weaving began — between design thinking, entrepreneurship, and personal storytelling.

Scaling with Intention

Too often, the idea of “scaling” a business is reduced to growth for growth’s sake — more clients, bigger teams, higher fees. But for me, scaling meant deepening, not just expanding.

That’s why I structured Architecture Speaks Volumes as a practice with multiple distinct but connected voices:

• The ASV Atelier: My design studio — where I work on design projects grounded in slowness, care, and material storytelling.

• The ASV Edit: A boutique for designed objects, scarves, and photographs — each item an archive of memory and meaning.

• ASV blogs & Podcasts: A space for memoir, design writing, and reflections — where I can explore the edges of architecture, culture, and emotion.

Each branch is its own channel, but together, they speak to a shared belief: that architecture is not just built — it is felt, remembered, experienced and expressed.

The Need for Multiple Streams — Not Just for Profit

In today’s world, many of us are waking up to the fact that a single stream of income is no longer sustainable — especially for creatives. But I didn’t create The ASV Edit just to diversify revenue. I created it to give form to ideas that couldn’t live inside floor plans.

Sometimes a scarf carries more meaning than a structure. Sometimes a photograph captures more memory than a model. The boutique allows me to share fragments of my design language in tactile, intimate ways. It also invites those who may never commission a building to still be part of this story — to wear, hold, or gift a piece of the practice.

In this way, income and impact become intertwined. Not in a transactional sense, but in a meaningful exchange of value and vision.

Building a Community that Listens

The real reason I built ASV in this way — across multiple modes — is because I didn’t want to simply launch a brand. I wanted to build a community.

A community of thinkers, feelers, makers, and quiet rebels. People who believe that the built environment is never neutral. People who notice the curve of a stair, the softness of a wall, the stillness in a courtyard. People who understand that architecture is never just structure — it is memory, language, and care.

I write for them. I design for them. I edit for them.

And I share my stories — including the difficult ones — because I believe that vulnerability is part of architecture too. We build from who we are.

In Closing: Architecture Speaks Volumes

What does it mean to birth a design practice in this moment?

For me, it means resisting narrow definitions. It means allowing architecture to speak through drawings, yes — but also through short film, curated objects, essays, poems, materiality, vision and small moments of shared wonder. It means embracing the many voices that live inside me — the architect, the writer, the daughter, the wife,the witness — and letting them all have a place in the room.

Because I still believe that architecture speaks.

And if we listen carefully enough,

it speaks volumes.