My Journey
My path to preservation has never followed a straight line.
My background spans education, history, interior design, and preservation—disciplines that initially seemed separate but ultimately led me toward the same question: how do the environments around us influence the way people and communities develop?
Education taught me to look beyond outcomes and understand the foundations necessary for growth. History taught me that places carry meaning far beyond their physical fabric. Interior design taught me to understand space from the perspective of the people who actually use it.
Together, those perspectives now shape the work of Chapman Historic Design.
My Philosophy
Preservation should not freeze places in time. The goal is to understand what gives a place meaning, preserve what deserves to endure, and create opportunities for it to remain relevant to the people and communities around it.
Research into Practice
My graduate research brought these disciplines together through an investigation of adaptive reuse and resilient community regeneration.
That work led to the development of the Structural Scaffolding Framework, which applies principles drawn from educational theory to the interconnected conditions that influence community resilience.
Today, I continue exploring how preservation, research, and design can help historic places remain meaningful, useful, and viable for the people who inherit them.
What Guides My Work
Heritage
Understand why a place matters to people before deciding what it should become.
People
Design around the people who live, work, learn, and gather there.
Place
Recognize that buildings exist within larger cultural, economic, and community systems.
Possibility
Preserve what matters while allowing historic places to continue evolving.
Experience & Capabilities
Historic preservation · Adaptive reuse · Interior design · Community resilience research · Section 106 · HABS documentation · Historic resource research · Grant work · Space planning · Material research