our ethos

A well designed home supports and deepens your sense of well-being. It can elevate the quotidian acts of sleeping, cooking, bathing, dressing, working, cleaning, celebrating, loving, meditating, making offerings, and relaxing into meaningful rituals. It isn’t a luxury, it’s essential. Your well-being is essential.

Good design has an element of magic to it, because it can change you on a cellular level. Your nervous system is continuously calibrating to your surroundings. Let’s create a space that speaks to your most fundamental needs to chill out and be creatively inspired and sleep well and feel safe and cook great food. Your home should be a sanctuary. A space that supports you on this level can improve so many facets of your life. This concept is foundational for all our work.

Good design is trend-proof. Good design does not cycle faster than a typical construction schedule. You can make design-forward choices without being bland or reductive, or designing for an unknown-but-apparently-not-very-chic future buyer. Let’s bring back individual style.

Ash and Jasper does not have a strict design point of view because we are more interested in making a great space for you than in re-creating our signature style over and over again for people to live with. Amy has trained and worked all over the globe, is educated in design, art history, construction, and project management. She prefers to start from a place of curiosity, rather than conformity. It’s your house. Let’s make it truly yours.

Good design is doing more with less. It lets beautiful materials speak for themselves, is tactile and supple, supports local-to-you artists and craftspeople keeping old practices alive, and is attuned to the energies of the place, and the changing seasons.

The internet, and visually based social media in particular, has contributed to an accelerated erasure of regional differences, and of designing for the style of the house, individual tastes or needs, or even the climate. We must start with what and where the house is, the land it sits on, and what it is asking for.

What looks amazing in a designer’s portfolio pictures doesn’t always function well in real life. We’re going to have to be a little bit practical, both with how spaces are arranged and what works for you and your budget.

To enthusiastically approve a design decision, you have to know what you (actually) like. I teach you to learn about your own style. Part of our process might be educational at first, to gauge what you love and what you don’t, and unwind some assumptions you might have, and be curious and open. You might surprise yourself about your own marvelous, intuitive vibe.

I love your weird ideas. The more information I have about how you really want to live, the better. Talk to me. Let’s make it happen. I will help you make grounded, informed choices.

It’s completely normal for a house to take a number of years to get “done”. Have a plan, so your slow-burn reno looks cohesive over time, is prioritized, and makes efficient use of your budget. Seriously: start with a plan.

I don’t believe that tasteful is always the way. Sometimes “tasteful” can take the life out of a space. I have good taste, (if I do say so…) but every space needs an element of the edgy or unexpected or whimsical to really come alive.

Everyone deserves access to expert advice, regardless of the size or scale of the project. I would even say that the more modest the budget, the more important it is to make that money work smart for you. The stakes are high for someone remodeling their one and only home. I want you to build equity smartly.  

We can make any place awesome. Tending the neglected or complicated land and structures back to harmony is a favorite thing of mine. All living things thrive in the glow of loving attention, homes and land are no exception.

We celebrate your small wins. Finally getting that one room/hallway/whatever done is a big deal. Let’s do it.

Calm and organized project management requires a series of simple but critical steps to follow. It’s not a software, it’s a set of skills. Early in my career I worked for a highly accomplished designer with an impeccable pedigree that didn’t permit the team to use computers. (Computers 'ruined the view’ of the office from their desk. It was the first hint that my chosen profession could be a splash impractical about what a room required to be fit for purpose…) My job was to keep track of every dollar, every trade, every little piece of hardware, every paint sample and fabric and wallpaper memo, every 15th century Italian console stuck in customs, for multi-year, multi-million dollar projects, with paper and pen. Literally thousands of items, somewhere in production, in a warehouse, in customs, at the auction house, with an artisan, under my desk… Changes happened on the daily. I learned how to keep it all together from that experience. (I mean, sort of…It was madness.) But that’s the origin story of why I love a good spreadsheet and key processes. Also why I will always call bullshit when chaos reigns on a project. There is a better way.

Everything is composed of energy, in an absolutely literal and not metaphorical kind of way. It lives in/is all objects, materials, lands, homes, the very water and air, and ourselves. Everything is alive and sentient, and all of it requires attentive care and feeding. We are in continual communication and reciprocity with our surroundings, and the various echoes and vibrations in our personal energy field and geographic location and ancestral lines. A core part of my work involves tapping into the energies in the house and the land and checking for balance and harmony. This is where I prefer to start.

How would I describe my personal style? High 1970s California hippie brutalism. Like a child of Bauhaus dropped out and joined a west Marin commune circa 1972. If you asked me for a lushly padded conversation pit around a wood burning stove, but make it feel fresh and relevant, I would not hesitate. More houseplants? Yes. But if you’re after Cape Cod traditional, or something cottage-y but elevated, or extremely pared back Japandi, I’m here for it, and will make it sing, and work with the existing house architecture.