Abundance through
minimalism.

I grew up in Longmont, Colorado — close enough to Boulder to absorb environmentalist thinking through osmosis, close enough to the mountains to feel them pulling me toward something I couldn't name. Math and ceramics came naturally in high school — the convergence of structural logic and material craft. That combination pointed toward architecture, but not the conventional kind.

At CU Boulder's Program of Environmental Design, I learned to think about buildings as part of a larger ecology — not structures in isolation, but whole systems. I was a provocative student. In a semester centered on LEED certification, I challenged the framework as insufficient and presented the theories of the Living Building Challenge instead — closed-loop waste management, wastewater recycling, buildings that participate in their ecosystems rather than minimizing damage to them.

As a student I spent long stretches in Veedauwoo, Wyoming — camping among granite formations that predate human civilization, watching sunsets collide with ancient rock. In those landscapes I could feel the structure of topography and ecology, and see humans as part of it. I could see how a people could live on the land and create structure without the strip mall, or the car, or the interstate. That wasn't nostalgia. It was architecture at the scale of landscape — and it changed how I think about everything.

When I won Young Designer of the Year, it validated the direction. That macro-scale problems look different when approached from micro-scale architectural concepts. That waste cycles as self-contained closed loops, moving across ecosystems, can restore landscapes to unimpacted states. I later returned to teach in the program — an experience that sharpened my ability to articulate design intent and gave me a practitioner's respect for how hard it is to communicate complex ideas clearly.

At 25 I was working at EarthRoamer as a woodworker and decided to build a one-piece composite camper in my backyard. I built the shed first, then the camper inside it. The decision to use an induction cooktop spurred the fully electric approach — when solar panels connect directly to the food you cook, something fundamental clicks. That connection between energy source and daily life was the design thesis made physical.

I built Campworks by obsessing over real-world design details in the product during the day, then shifting to narrative, web development, and sales process at night. That feedback cycle — where product decisions informed brand language and brand language informed product decisions — became the operating model I still use.

The NS-1 earned global Dell advertising features, World Futures Design Awards, a Fast Company honorable mention, and recognition at the Electrified Expo. More importantly, it proved that excellent materiality, design logic, and efficiency could converge in a single product — and that the same process applies to building a brand as it does to building a camper in a shed.