Building furniture that is fine-looking and functional is something I came to at a young age. Building furniture to accommodate medical equipment at home is something I came to after decades as an architect designing hospitals, patient rooms and operating theaters and other various medical spaces.

I grew up in the Bronx, in the 60s and 70s, the seventh of eight children. We lived in apartments in townhouses and the projects, and though we did not all live together at once, by the time I was born my oldest brother was finishing college at Yale, so I learned early on the importance of maximizing space.

My first woodworking project, when I was eight years old, was to build myself a piece of furniture for the bedroom I shared with my brother. My passions in those days were reading comics, drawing my own action heroes and woodworking, so I combined my talents to design and build a custom bookcase for my comic collection. In middle school, I built another utilitarian piece of furniture – which I have to this day – a stool out of maple with walnut wedges, so I would always have a place to sit when the apartment was overflowing with family.

By the time I graduated from high school, all of my siblings but the youngest had gone to college and I, like they, followed the path our parents had set for us. (The youngest, when his time came, closed the circle, choosing to walk in the footsteps of our oldest brother at Yale.) I attended the University of Pennsylvania where I studied art and architecture, and then continued on to earn my master’s in architecture after an additional three years of required coursework.

After graduate school, I spent my first few years working on the Central Artery Tunnel Project (Boston’s Big Dig, which at the time was the largest public works project in the country), before turning my focus almost exclusively to the healthcare sector. Over the past two decades I have planned, designed and managed healthcare architecture projects ranging from institutional campus master plans to critical care buildings to hospital units and patient rooms. I have worked with architecture firms specializing in healthcare on new construction and renovation of existing medical facilities, and as in-house architect at the Phelps Memorial Hospital– always with an eye toward integrating engineering, equipment and innovative technologies to provide patient centered solutions within the strict parameters of Department of Health guidelines and limited space.

Now in the time of COVID I have come full circle, my focus back on home and the paramount importance it plays in our lives, using everything I have learned to create comfortable and calm spaces through furniture design that efficiently and harmoniously accommodates life-saving medical equipment.