004 / who is she?
vulnerability, half-baked ideas, and a reckoning with modern qualification

It's been an ugly struggle to find the courage to put myself out here. The design work in itself can be deeply personal– but to write and actually publish? It's enough to make this introvert stay in bed all day. It's tender, half-baked, and stream-of-consciousness but the obsession appears to be unwavering and I'm now convinced that writing for me, as for many, will help make sense of thoughts and my place in the world. My hope, of course, is that I, too, can offer you something: touching on the place in yourself that resonates when your physical world is calibrated to your being. A lofty task? Probably. A new challenge? Let's go, baby. 

And so, I've grappled with leading with any credentials. Sometimes they feel irrelevant after those formative career years and sometimes it seems like nothing matters anyway in the age of insta-coaches, life-hacks, and the buying of credibility. That aside, I'll devote this essay to a bit about me, the formal and the informal, as a lens through which I approach this work. 

I'm the only daughter of a designer and a software engineer. I used to think it was a classic case of art-meets-science, but my father (the engineer) often spent his mornings charting waters for sailing and his evenings rebuilding computers at the kitchen table. I ask you, then, is science not also art? I was encouraged from an early age to express, to create.  I lived in a universe of theater and dance, surrounded by worldbuilding, storytelling, choreography, costume, and expression– well into college. It was there that a mediocre production of A Midsummer Night's Dream would turn my attention from the stage to the theater itself. This magnificent vessel that held us together: audience and performer, light and sound, a resonance of shared experience created at the intersection of bodies and space. Something was born there: a supernova, a bell that can't be unrung. I have never looked back. 

Fast forward to a BS in Architecture (UTexas '10), a Master of Architecture (Washington '13) and a fellowship year at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, I harkened back to this nagging inquiry with a thesis investigating the role of grief and memory in our architecture. Ten years later, I swear this research was the happiest year of work of my life. But here's the thing about a thesis– it doesn't touch lives. Mine has a typo in the dedication page because even I couldn't be bothered to read it one last time.

Work in my mid and late twenties brought me to New York and Los Angeles, where I did some things that people always seem to think are pretty cool. I worked on exceptionally boutique and interesting retail concepts under David Mann, incredible residential projects, and was on a small team that opened four concepts for Soho House and a few for Bunkhouse Group. By 30, I was somehow entrusted with leading the architecture and interior design for entire boutique hotel properties. I was also not doing super well. 

I'll spare the details of my burnout, my disconnection, and the Saturn return that knocked me sideways in the years leading up to the pandemic. What I can say is that I rediscovered a spaciousness in my life through connecting with my own home. It's not a cute interior design story– I bought a house on Craigslist and learned how to drywall. Something changed in me and I found my center, learned again how to play, to think, and to write, entered into new relationships and a much healthier ecosystem of my body and mind. 

Today, I'm based in Austin, Texas, where I live with my partner (he's a builder– so this conversation never ends!), my dog, and my aspiring garden. I'm a registered architect, registered interior designer, WELL AP, and member of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture. I'm also a Pisces, a highly sensitive person, a synesthesiate, and a Generator (HD). I run a design practice (MELANIE RAINES) where I get to work with remarkable people creating artful homes. It's incredibly intimate and artistically rewarding. It's won notable awards in its few years of existence. I've been fortunate that clients share trust in me when the stakes are quite high. But there’s been an unrelenting itch that says that the process of creating a design for visual pleasure and some semblance of function is quite out of date. Regardless of client, scale, or temperament, designers end up getting a crash-course in human psychology. After all, we’re disrupting the most primal sense of security for our clients and their families. It gets worse before it gets better, and to top it all off– it’s one of the largest investments (emotional, financial) most people make in a lifetime. It’s become hard to ignore the connection between this human psychological element and emerging data in the cognitive sciences, neuroscience, and behavioral psychology. Did I lose you there already? It’s okay, because it’s my aim here to bridge that gap: to translate and extract meaning in real time, through a lens of High Design, creating spaces that optimize, calibrate, and cultivate awe in the souls that inhabit them.

I decided to create Hardholy as a modality towards the pursuit of this obsession of mine: unpacking the relationship between humans and built space. This has been on my mind for nearly fifteen years already as I've worked to find my voice, produce some built projects, and bring some lived experience to this inquiry. I should underscore that I'm writing this for me, to build a practice, to learn what I know, and to go deeper– so I don't claim to have any answers. I do, however, offer this piece as a badge of credential and story that give a foundation to this work, if it matters to you. 

This is not a commodity, this is an expedition. It's an excavation of our collective self, projected into physical space through story.
Let's see where this goes.