Designers & Builders

About Designers & Builders

Designers & Builders Podcast Dive into the stories behind the spaces we live and work in. This podcast brings together interior designers, architects, and builders from every discipline—commercial and residential—to share the mindset, process, and passion that drives their craft. We explore their journeys, from early inspirations to innovative builds, and uncover how they’re shaping a new era of design and construction. Join our community of creative pioneers and discover how a fresh perspective on building can transform environments and lives.

Publisher

Designers&Builders

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

19 Mar 2025

Latest episode

24 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

51 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   24 Sept 2026

   Pablo Escutia, KKC Development

   Pablo Escutia wanted to be a psychologist. He ended up running KKC Development, a design build firm in the South Bay of Los Angeles that draws houses and then builds them, and arguing that the split between those two jobs was never real to begin with. A line from one of his professors stuck with him: everything works on paper. Finding out what happens when the paper meets the site is what moved him from architecture into custom home building, and it is the case he spends the rest of the conversation making. He studied architecture, did internship work at the higher end of the profession, and found the corporate world too structured for the way he operates. Smaller firms in the beach cities suited him better, where the all hands approach meant the ceiling on what he learned was whatever he was willing to put in. After five years he crossed to the opposite side and went into construction, on the theory that there was more to learn where the two worlds meet than in either one alone. Understanding design is not enough on its own for custom home building. You also have to understand the materials, the structure, the geology of a site, how the sun crosses it and what the wind does to it. Design build carries baggage in his industry, the assumption being that a firm is either good at drawing or good at building and cannot be both. His counter is that design build is a conversation where everyone involved speaks the same language, whether his team designs the house or works alongside one of the architects in town. In practice that means being brought in early, flagging the complicated detail during the design phase, and working out how a Spanish tail detail with bronze straps will weather in salt air before anyone commits to it. It is also why the firm takes on only a handful of custom home building projects a year and will sit through ten or twenty design meetings on each one. He is candid about the harder parts: inheriting the company after losing the previous owner to cancer, losing good employees before he learned to stop red lining their work, and keeping a business coach because nobody hands you a pamphlet when you open a company. For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is a clear account of what changes when the person who used to do the work starts managing the people doing it. Pablo is specific about delegation, that if someone cleared a multi stage interview then the trust decision was already made at hiring, and that the best compliment he can imagine is an employee leaving to start their own firm. He is just as specific about where custom home building is heading, toward coalitions with architects who want a builder in the room early rather than a set of plans thrown over the wall. His closing advice is to decide which kind of builder or architect you actually want to be, then stay selfless about it, because a finished project belongs to the laborers and the subcontractors as much as to whoever signed the contract. Chapters00:00 From Architecture School to the Construction Side03:07 Redefining What Design Build Actually Means06:02 Balancing Design Quality, Cost and the Homeowner07:42 Why the Firm Caps How Many Projects It Takes10:51 Using AI So Client Details Stop Slipping Through12:51 Taking Over a Company With Thirty Years Behind It17:02 Hiring for Design Background and Transferable Skills19:22 Learning to Delegate, and What It Cost to Learn It27:01 The Future of Design Build and Bigger Partnerships30:02 Define Your Path, and Treat Everyone on It Well The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry. Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scalebuildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level. Connect with us at:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/de

2. 

   17 Sept 2026

   Steve Larosiliere & Alyssa Olson

   Ten months ago Alyssa Olson left a salaried seat to run her own landscape architecture practice. Since then she has been moving between master planning work, local residential gardens, campus work in Michigan, projects in New York and Washington, and a backlog of wood projects she finally has the hours to build. The contrast is the part she likes. It is also what makes the calendar nearly impossible to hold. In this episode, hosts Steve Larosiliere and Alyssa Olson catch up for the first time since she went independent and compare notes on what that actually costs. Alyssa is direct about the trade. The freedom and the day to day flexibility are real, and so is the work of building everything underneath them: the communication habits, the organisation, the finances, the tracking. A salaried job runs on someone else's structure, and a landscape architecture practice run solo does not. Steve walks through a single day on his own side of the business, from a coffee shop he is bidding with a general contractor partner, where the answer turned out to be charging for a pre-construction agreement instead of guessing at the scope, to an exterior renovation where the concrete came back the wrong colour and somebody has to be told to redo it. The conversation then turns to a question neither of them has finished answering. Steve has been working out what his artistic point of view is, the way he would ask it of a painter, and he puts it to Alyssa plainly: with hundreds of thousands of people having moved through things she designed, what is her gift to them. Her answer is specific. The basics are non negotiable, the programming, the circulation, the stormwater, the paving and seating and lighting and planting that landscape architecture has to resolve before anything else. The craft lives in the small custom moments layered inside them, at any budget, including the affordable housing she has done a great deal of. On a plaza next to housing in San Francisco, built over an old rail line, she took one section of I beam and made it an armrest, a splash block for a rainwater leader, an edge detail and the gravel back for planting. One material, sliced and diced, doing four jobs. For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is an unusually candid hour on independent landscape architecture and on the middle of a transition rather than the tidy version told afterwards. It covers getting paid to learn the work you eventually want to own for yourself, why public RFPs are often written with a team already in mind, and why knowing people in the places you want to work matters more than the proposal does. It ends somewhere neither of them planned. Talking about how artists show their work, they arrive at the idea of an exhibition, a room where the designers and builders they have interviewed come together, put the details behind their projects on the table, and say what went wrong and what they learned. They notice out loud that they have just designed something. Chapters00:00 Ten Months Into an Independent Practice01:52 What the Freedom Actually Costs02:52 A Coffee Shop Bid and a Pre-Construction Agreement05:11 The Wrong Colour Concrete and the Last 20 Percent07:44 Trading a Salaried Seat for Flexibility09:24 Getting Paid to Learn the Work You Want to Own13:14 Building Teams and Chasing Public RFPs14:34 What Is Your Artistic Point of View19:51 Custom Moments Inside the Basic Requirements22:17 Designing an Exhibition Community for Designers and Builders The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry. Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scalebuildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level. Connect with us at:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/Join our newsl

3. 

   9 Sept 2026

   Priscilla Auyeung, GAMPworks

   A friend saw Priscilla Auyeung standing next to a materials palette in an Instagram repost and messaged to ask whether she took on interiors too. She did not, at the time. She said she did. GAMPworks was founded somewhere in the middle of the project that created it, and a year later that project is an award winning trading card store in New York City and the foundation of an interior design business she runs alongside a full time job. Priscilla is the founder and design principal of GAMPworks. By day she works in master planning at a New York architecture office, where she describes herself as still near the bottom of the totem pole. By night she is the design principal, the business development person, the PR coordinator and the founder. The two scales feed each other. She spent last year on a minor league baseball stadium during the day and picking finishes and grout colours after dark, and found the thinking behind an entry sequence and the thinking behind two thousand square feet of retail interior sit closer together than the job titles suggest. Her account of how the studio actually got built, from filing the LLC to getting people to take a new interior design business seriously, is the part most founders leave out. The store is a study in constraint. Two thousand square feet in a landmarked building that spent an earlier life as a meat locker, insulated so heavily the space rang like a music venue and needed an acoustic consultant before anything else. The client arrived with a mood board holding concepts in open conflict: feudal Kyoto, mid century modern, sports court retro, and something quintessentially New York. Priscilla and her design partner resolved it programmatically first, splitting a bright maple front of house from a walnut back of house, darker and more intimate, modelled on the private rooms luxury retailers walk their best customers into. What began as a furniture fit out with nothing structural touched ended with most of the walls demolished, a sink moved, a pantry carved out of an oversized bathroom, and permits filed under both the buildings department and landmark review. For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is a practical account of how a side project turns into a firm. Priscilla is specific about what finally moved a client who came from finance and tech, which was never the aesthetic argument on its own but the same decision restated in terms of circulation, product visibility and durability across a long lease. She is just as specific about what she would streamline next time, from revision rounds that circle back to the first idea to the vendor and materials database she admits she still does not have. Anyone building an interior design business on nights, weekends and lunch breaks will recognise both the exhaustion she refuses to romanticise and the line she keeps coming back to, that nothing is as serious as we are making it. Chapters: 00:00 An Instagram Repost That Started an Interior Design Business 04:09 Running a Studio on Early Mornings, Late Nights and Lunch Breaks 09:42 Feudal Kyoto, Mid Century Modern and a Sports Court 12:18 Designing the Back of House Like a Luxury Showroom 15:49 Bringing On Consultants, and What It Costs to Wait 19:33 How a Furniture Fit Out Became a Full Demolition 21:02 Making the Case to a Client Who Thinks in Numbers 26:48 What She Would Streamline on the Next Project 36:13 Budget, Durability and Building for a Long Lease 46:17 Building the Brand and the Advice She Gives Herself The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry. Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scalebuildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level. Connect with us at:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersand

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