The Name Was Always Outside

All moments of boundless experience.

I am four, maybe five years old, standing in the coastal grass of a wild property my family had big dreams for. The Manzanita grows dense around the edges of the clearing, and in the evenings a cool breeze whispers through the oaks, the grass moving in long slow waves. The bermuda buttercups speckle the clover with bright bursts of yellow.

I remember picking one and the soft stems breaking between my fingers. My wild curly hair stuck in my mouth, and my sticky fingers working to remove it. And there is a zap of lemony zest from the stem I was not expecting, but thrilled to discover. I stood there in the swaying grass, eyes wide, completely delighted.

I am older now. My sister Joelle and I on horseback galloping through the oak woodlands of my parents' sixteen acre ranch. I use the word trail loosely because we were blazing them ourselves. The scratchy oak leaves drag across my shoulders and catch my face and hair. I don't care. Even slightly. We are moving fast and free and the whole world has narrowed down to the trees parting in front of us and the sound of hooves beating the sandy ground.

A deer appears between the shrubs maybe 15 feet ahead.

We go after it almost instinctually, without decision, just whipping around corners in unison, laughing and breathless and completely unhinged in the best possible way. I look back at Joelle and she is holding on for dear life, her face flushed and absolutely alive. My horse is warm beneath me, steaming in the chill of the afternoon, his excitement matching mine so completely that I cannot tell where his heartbeat ends and mine begins.

We were not separate from that place. We were inside it. A part of it. Experiencing it in all its beautiful natural glory.

I remember in college… up before sunrise, hiking Bishop Peak in the dark with my roommate. Everything drizzly. The morning dew settled on every rock and trunk. The air smelled of wet soil and the only sounds were our footsteps and the occasional rustle of something in a brush likely looking for its breakfast.

We reach the top just as the marine layer splits.

The sun streams through the gap… a single beam, then two, then suddenly the whole of San Luis Obispo laid out below us in that extraordinary contrast of bright green hills and ancient volcanic rock outcroppings that glow amber in the early light. I stood there with that cold air on my face and warmth beginning to spread across my shoulders and I feel… important. Not in an ego sense. In a belonging sense. Like I am exactly the right size for the world I am standing inside of.

I have chased that feeling ever since.

And then there is Tucson.

I did not expect to love the desert the way I do. The Sonoran Desert is not a landscape that asks for your affection. It does not soften itself or make itself easy to read. It asks you to pay attention on its own terms or not at all.

The Clarkson's spiny lizard that lives in the broken lagoon out front, doing pushups on the warm stone in the afternoon. The javelinas shuffling in their unhurried line along the trail at the back of the property at dusk. The bobcat we found once resting in the shade of the desert spoon, so still and so perfectly placed that I almost walked past without seeing it. The coyote that trotted down our driveway one morning as if it lived next door, which of course it does. The roadrunner snatching insects from the air under the African sumac with careful precision. The intense Arizona sun filtering through the tiny leaflets of a palo verde and landing on the ground below in a thousand shifting pieces of light.

Every day this landscape shows me something. And every day I understand a little better why the work I do matters.

I named this practice Drawn Outside for many reasons.

On the surface it is simple: an invitation. To step outside. To spend time in the places just beyond the door that so many of us have quietly stopped using, stopped noticing, stopped feeling entitled to enjoy.

But the name carries more than that.

To be drawn outside is to be pulled toward something by a force you don't entirely choose. The way I have always been pulled. Pulled toward the grass dancing in the coastal breeze. Toward the deer darting between coast live oaks. Toward the summit where the marine layer divides. That pull is not optional for me. It never has been. And I have come to believe it is not optional for most people. It is just that the spaces in their lives haven't given them anywhere worth going.

That is what this practice exists to change.

Drawn also speaks to the act of drawing itself… the physical, deliberate work of putting pencil to paper and translating a vision into a plan. Of studying a site carefully enough to understand what it is already doing before you ask it to do something more. Of thinking on paper, which is different from thinking in your head in ways that truly matter. Design begins with drawing. Not the software. The hand.

And outside is not just a direction. It is a philosophy. It is the belief that the spaces we inhabit beyond our walls , beyond the yard, the garden, the courtyard, the patio, the stretch of ground between the door and the street, they are not afterthoughts. They are extensions of the life happening inside. They shape how we feel, how we gather, how we rest, how we connect to the land and to each other.

The most meaningful landscapes feel natural to their surroundings. They carry a strong sense of place and are thoughtfully connected to the people who experience them every day. They are not designed to be photographed or admired from a distance. They are designed to be inhabited. To invite people outside, to keep them there, to give them somewhere worth being.

That is the whole philosophy. Everything else is in service of it.

I think about those moments often. The buttercup on my tongue. Joelle clinging to the saddle in the dust of my horse’s canter. The summit in the early light. The bobcat perfectly still in the desert shade.

None of them happened inside.

All of them shaped the person who eventually sat down and built something called Drawn Outside: A practice rooted in the belief that the land around us is not background. It is not decoration. It is not a problem to be solved or a surface to be managed.

It is the place where life actually happens, when we let it.

When was the last time a space pulled you outside and kept you there? I'd love to know what it felt like.