Some clients arrive with drawings. Others arrive with a feeling.

Both are a workable place to start. I co-founded Breskin Development in 2009 and have been its Creative Director since — involved from land purchase through conceptual design to final presentation, on new construction, historic restoration and custom builds in New York City and across the East End.

My focus is form, functionality and feeling. The last is the hardest to draw, and it is the one that decides whether a house works. I take as readily from art, fashion and technology as from architecture, and I listen before I specify: the brief that matters is usually the one a client hasn't articulated yet.

When the Captain John Hulbert House was finished — a c.1760 residence in Sag Harbor's historic district that the building inspector had questioned could be saved at all — my family and I moved in, the first people to live there in years. What I noticed was not the scale of it.

"It's the little things, like the back stairs or second-floor laundry."

The East Hampton Star

I came to design from financial services and a beauty business I founded, and hold an MBA in marketing. Clients are intricately involved in the planning and design of their homes, and I prefer it that way. A custom house is a long conversation, and the questions worth asking tend to come up at framing rather than after the drywall is closed.