I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease as a teenager, which arrived alongside migraines that could flatten an entire week into a dark room with the curtains drawn. Nobody tells you at that age what a chronic illness actually means in practice, how it restructures every decision you make about food, sleep, stress, environment, until the management of your own body becomes a second occupation running parallel to whatever life you are trying to build on top of it.
What followed was a decades-long process of tearing apart everything I assumed was fine and rebuilding it around what my body actually needed. The food I ate, the products I used, the way I slept, the air I breathed inside the places I lived. I did not start that process because I was interested in wellness as a concept. I started because I was sick, truly sick, the kind where you realize that the default settings of modern life are working against you in ways nobody warned you about.
The Built Environment Was the Last Thing I Changed
Most people who get serious about their health start with diet. Then exercise. Then supplements, sleep routines, stress management, all the personal interventions you can control through discipline. I did all of that. What took me years longer to recognize was that the spaces I lived in were undermining every other decision I made. Low-grade mold behind drywall that never dried properly. VOCs off-gassing from paint, flooring, furniture that smelled new for a reason. Air systems that recirculated the same stale particulate matter through every room. Windows that never opened in buildings designed to seal the outside out entirely.
Once I started researching what buildings actually do to the people inside them, the scale of the problem became impossible to ignore. Seventy percent of American homes have mold. Indoor air quality in a typical home is two to five times worse than the air outside. The materials lining most walls, floors, and cabinets were never tested for long-term health effects on the humans living inches away from them. I overhauled my own living space completely, specified every material, rethought every surface, changed the air filtration, replaced the landscaping outside. The difference was not subtle.
Wellness is Not a Trend
People talk about wellness right now as though it is a market category, a branding exercise, a lifestyle aesthetic that sells candles and retreat weekends. I understand the skepticism, because a great deal of what passes for wellness is cosmetic. Underneath the branding, though, something real is happening. A growing number of people are arriving at the same conclusion I arrived at through illness: that modern life has optimized for convenience, speed, and cost in ways that quietly erode the health of the people living inside its systems. The food supply, the pharmaceutical model, the construction industry, all of it built for efficiency rather than for the biological needs of the human body.
The wellness real estate market reached $548 billion last year, growing at nearly 20% annually, because this realization is spreading. Sixty percent of homebuyers now say health is the primary reason they want specific features in their homes. These are not fringe consumers chasing trends. These are people who have started paying attention to what their environments do to them, the same way I started paying attention when my own body forced the question.
Why This Became a Life Mission
I did not study landscape architecture and environmental design because I wanted to build pretty gardens. I studied them because I had already lived the experience of transforming a space from something that was slowly making me worse into something that actively supported my healing, and I wanted to understand the principles behind why it worked. The answer turned out to be simple in theory, difficult in execution: a home should respond to the biological needs of the person inside it. Clean air, non-toxic materials, natural light, native landscapes that support the local ecology rather than poisoning it with pesticides, spatial arrangements that reduce stress rather than create it.
Axis By Design exists because I believe the transformation I experienced should be available to anyone who wants it, whether they are already dealing with a chronic condition or simply want to be proactive about preventing one. Some of my future clients will come to me because they are sick and looking for answers the way I once was. Others will come because they have watched someone they love struggle and refuse to accept that a home should be a passive container rather than an active participant in their family's health. Either way, the work is the same: designing spaces that give back more than they take.
Wellness is not a trend for me. It is the reason I am here, doing this work, on this island, building this practice. It is the way.