Building La Cuna: Design and Belonging
Winter
I didn’t set out to design a house. I set out to find some balance—a place that could hold us and our future collaborators without closing us off to nature. When I came to Riley with sketches and urgency, he didn’t critique; he asked questions. What are you trying to build into your days? What’s the smallest thing this idea needs to work? What do you want this building to ask of you? His process was maddeningly slow, relational, Socratic. I brought him literally hundreds of ideas. Where I wanted answers, he offered silence. Sometimes I wondered if he was designing the buildings or redesigning me. Probably both. It was a real-life Mr. Miyagi apprenticeship—wax on, wax off, the lessons buried in the rhythm of designing.
Spring
The land began to answer back. The wind drew my openings. The granite outcroppings set my paths. I learned to read the site like a text—where the grasses bent, where runoff pooled, where light lingered. Belonging started to feel like a practice of attention: seeing what’s already there and aligning yourself with it.
Summer
As the framing rose, the design began to read less like a cluster of structures and more like a series of rooms within a garden—each space breathing into the next. The paths between them carried as much intention as the walls themselves, guiding movement through shade, scent, and wind. The garden isn't something outside the house—it is what we are growing to hold the house together.
Autumn
Now, when the light shifts across the stone, I can see the choices we made taking shape in real time. Every part of the structure points back to a question we worked through—how to catch shade, how to frame comfort, how to let the air move. The buildings don’t close off the landscape; they work with it. And they keep reminding me that belonging isn’t something you finish—it’s something you keep practicing, season after season.
