layers upon layers: my life as a palimpsest

Sometimes I think life is like a page scraped thin—still bearing the ghost-ink of every story we’ve ever lived, even as we write new lines over the old ones.

There’s a word for that.

Palimpsest.

It sounds vaguely medical or like a bureaucratic form you’d have to fill out at the DMV. Which is tragic, because it’s one of the most beautiful ideas I know.

A palimpsest is a surface that’s been written on, scraped off, and written over again. An ancient manuscript that still bears traces of earlier words underneath the new ones.

It’s layered history. Evidence of what was, even as something new is taking shape.

And the older I get—and the longer I work with old houses—the more I realize: palimpsest isn’t just a design concept for me. It’s the story of my life… and of all our lives if we know what to look for.

The Writer Before the Designer

Before I ever restored a single piece of plaster, I was a writer.

Words were my first tools. My original design medium was language—structure, rhythm, flow. I wrote scripts, musicals, stories. Lines meant to make people laugh, or cry, or see something familiar in a startling new way.

And that part of me didn’t vanish when I started working in design.

It’s still there, ghost-writing every paint color description, every piece of web copy, every way I help clients tell the story of their home.

It’s why I see a room as narrative. Why I believe every scratch in a floorboard is a sentence fragment worth reading.

Japan, Scotland, and the Stories Under My Skin

I once lived in Japan, where history sits cheek-by-jowl with neon lights. Shrines behind convenience stores. Layers of culture built one atop another, each visible if you know where to look.

Then Scotland—a place that taught me stone remembers everything. Where the wind rattles through wynds older than most countries, and the past feels so present you could almost lean against it, like I did once in the insane wind on the Isle of Skye.

Those years abroad changed my sense of time. And space. And light. And beauty.

Even now, living in California, I’ll find myself layering a room like a Kyoto garden—moments of calm, surprises tucked around corners. Or craving the soft Northern light of an Edinburgh afternoon and chasing it with the perfect paint color.

I’m never just here. I’m always here, and there. A walking palimpsest.

A Philosophy in Layers

Sometimes clients ask why I care so much about leaving ghost marks visible when I restore a room. Why I’ll leave the outline of an old medicine cabinet on a bathroom wall instead of patching it smooth.

It’s because I believe in truthfulness.

We’ve all been scraped clean and written over at times. Changed by love, grief, travel, risk, second chances.

I think homes are like that too.

An old house deserves to show its chapters. To hold tension between what it was and what it’s becoming.

A Life—and a Business—in Layers

So yes, palimpsest is a weirdly unpoetic word for such a beautiful thing.

But it’s the perfect one for people like us. 

Millennials  have been asked to rebuild over and over. And I find it poignant and inspiring to have watched my generation layer their experiences into beautiful lives, bittersweet in their losses and their resilience. 

My business is layered over my past as a writer. My designs layer influences from Japan, Scotland, Italy, and my California roots. My color choices are loaded with those stories.

I’m not trying to erase the earlier drafts. I’m designing alongside them.

Because whether it’s a house or a life, I believe the most beautiful things are those where you can still read the traces of everything that came before.