Associate Principal, Sustainability Practice Leader



I’ve been in the industry for 16 years, including both time on the owner side and as a consultant. As a result, my clients benefit from my holistic point of view — I feel I can often help owners better understand their goals and even communicate them. I enjoy providing client multiple, relevant options, including those they may not have otherwise considered but excited to explore.

The built environment is, I feel, an inadequately appreciated. So many people spend more time at work than at home; so it should be a healthy, relaxing, engaging, and inspiring environment. This concept of how our physical environment directly impacts how we feel, think, experience… is a great responsibility. This keeps me coming back for more!

The Fort Macon State Park Visitor’s Center is a stand out project for me. Not only is it a visitor’s center for a beautiful park on the coast of North Carolina, it’s also adjacent to Fort Macon, a civil war-era sunken fort, which has been fully restored. The fort is near Beaufort, which was at great risk to numerous raids in the late 1700s and early 1800s from numerous hostile nations, as well as the famed pirate Blackbeard. The Visitor’s Center was built to teach the history of the area and serve as a hub for the state park, but it also had a secondary purpose as a hurricane command center. The facility has fully redundant utilities, a structure built to withstand Category 5 hurricane winds, with deep set windows and doors. Being situated so close to the delicate coast environment, sustainability was paramount; the project achieved LEED Gold. Local materials played a significant role in this, including locally produced bricks and timbers drenched from the coastal rivers left over from the ship-building industry in this region long ago. Each project is such a great story!

 

 

My Flipside

I seem to have a need for a creative outlet, otherwise my mind gets too wound up! Art, color, food…These are all the mediums that I love to express myself in. I’ve been known to lose hours of sleep coloring, sketching, painting, or cross stitching!!! This love of crafting something is shared with my two girls…we have a whole closet dedicated to arts and crafts! (Even my husband will get into the fun sometimes!)

Other times, you’ll find me curled up with a good book, or in the summers, on the lake paddle boarding.

My favorite “lunch break” in the summer is to head to my neighborhood lake and see how fast I can paddle board from end to end of the lake! It’s a great workout and the sunshine helps to clear my mind!

I also had the unique opportunity to work for a large national craft brewer and help build a new brewery from scratch. While I was there, was able to learn the full sensory process of evaluating beer, yes, making me a full fledged craft beer geek!

 

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