I plan homes that make daily life beautiful and functional for bodies that don't cooperate.
I do this because I needed it, and nobody had made it.
Eight diagnoses. That's the qualification.
While dealing with my own symptoms, I noticed huge gaps in the products made for people with chronic illness. Medical items were ugly, and wellness products mostly fell into the junk category. So I started looking for the things that should have been there already, and when I couldn't find them, I replaced them with prettier doppelgangers.
Then I found the same gaps in my own house. I started researching building facts. Which counter height I can work at on a bad day. Where the seat goes in the shower. How far a chair has to pull up to the sink.
The answer was that one size does not fit all when it comes to chronic illness. So I set out to make changes to how homes are designed around fluctuating capacity. I started with my own house first.
Ugly isn't neutral.
Somewhere along the way, design and the things disabled people need got sorted into separate piles. One pile was allowed enjoyment and beauty. The other was assigned function, in beige plastic, and one was expected to be grateful it existed at all.
It can't be chalked up to engineering. Why can't a shower seat and a grab bar be beautiful? The materials that take body weight have nothing to do with the ones that make something ugly.
A shower chair that humiliates you didn't miraculously become that way. Somebody made it, and nobody in that room ever pictured a person with a house they cared about.
The problem isn't that somebody weighed you up and decided against you. It's that nobody pictured you at all.
The proof, and the work.
- Design. I am obsessed with space planning. I started formal design coursework at UCLA Extension and stopped when the stress started causing flares, but I kept drawing anyway. I drew three complete layouts for my own building before I picked one, drawn at night, for a place I had not finished buying. It is the part of this work I would do whether anyone paid me or not.
- The certification. Certified Environmental Access Consultant, through VGM Live At Home. The training for evaluating a space around how a person actually moves through it, at any age. It isn't a licence and it doesn't make me an architect. Nothing structural, nothing stamped, nothing about egress. Those questions get named and handed to someone licensed.
- The renovation. A 1900s Chicago two-flat, nine hundred finished square feet, planned around the worst version of my week rather than the best. The Paulina Stop
- Speaking. Conversations, interviews and talks. Speaking, and work for product teams
Who I am when I'm not working.
I live in Chicago with my family. I think in structures. It's why everything I make comes out as a system instead of just advice, and it's why I'll redraw a floor plan six times and then lose an entire evening to unlacquered brass. I care about beautiful sentences and structurally honest systems in roughly equal measure. Same instinct, different material.
If you are about to change a house, the cheap moment is now.
I'm a residential accessibility consultant. I run consultations for homeowners and for the people planning on behalf of somebody else, before the drywall goes up.