The Architecture of Agency

Designing Homes for People Who Refuse to Live By Default

Most residential projects begin with a familiar list of requirements. A certain number of bedrooms and bathrooms, a kitchen, dining room, living spaces, perhaps a home office, gym, or guest suite. The sizes and finishes may vary enormously, but the underlying program remains remarkably consistent. Even at the highest end of the market, many homes are essentially larger, more luxurious versions of the same conventional arrangement.

Occasionally, however, I encounter a client who approaches the idea of home quite differently. Rather than beginning with a list of rooms, they begin with a vision of how they want to live. Their interests may involve making things, collecting, entertaining, experimenting, restoring cars, or pursuing some highly specialized passion. They aren't particularly interested in whether these activities belong in a conventional house. They're interested in creating an environment where those activities can flourish.

I've come to think of these people as high-agency clients. They tend to have a strong sense of what interests them, an appetite for pursuing those interests, and a willingness to challenge conventions that don't serve their purposes. They aren't necessarily more demanding than other clients, but they often ask more interesting questions.

For an architect, these can be extraordinarily rewarding relationships.

Beyond the Conventional Program

Architects use the term program to describe the spaces and functions a building needs to accommodate. In residential architecture, the program is often developed through a series of questions about room counts, square footage, adjacencies, and the practical requirements of daily life.

For a high-agency client, that conversation can become considerably more expansive. Instead of asking how many bedrooms a house should have, we might ask what activities deserve a permanent place in the client's life. What have they always wanted to learn, make, collect, or experience? What would they do if their home could support interests that conventional residential design rarely accommodates?

I think of the resulting projects as program-rich. Their complexity doesn't necessarily come from their size, but from the diversity and specificity of the activities they contain. A workshop, library, music room, observatory, vehicle collection, or specialized entertaining space may become just as important to the design as the kitchen or primary bedroom.

These spaces aren't simply amenities added to an otherwise conventional house. They can become the organizing ideas from which the architecture itself emerges.

A Rancho Built Around Possibility

One of our Southern California projects offers an unusually vivid example. Conceived as a pair of barn-like buildings connected by an elevated loggia and pergola, the SoCal Rancho brings together an extraordinary range of the client's interests within a single architectural composition.

The larger building accommodates five vehicle bays, including a car stacker and a mechanic's lift, along with dedicated wood and metal workshops. It's an environment intended not merely for storing vehicles and equipment, but for working on them. The spaces are conceived around the tools, clearances, circulation, and practical demands of activities that are central to the client's life.

The second building is even more varied. Crafting and electronics workshops occupy one portion, while an outdoor dining space creates a separation between those activities and a double-height pinball gallery. From there, a stair, elevator, and fire pole connect to a lower level containing a double-height library, with access to a speakeasy and a two-lane shooting range. Above, a catering kitchen, dining hall, and generous living room provide places for gathering and entertaining.

On paper, this might sound like an improbable collection of unrelated functions. But that's precisely what makes the architectural challenge interesting. The project isn't simply about accommodating a long list of unusual rooms. It's about giving those activities a coherent spatial organization, establishing meaningful relationships among them, and creating a place that feels intentional rather than assembled.

The elevated connection between the buildings, the transitions between indoor and outdoor spaces, and the movement between levels all contribute to an experience that could never have emerged from a conventional residential brief.

When Interests Become Architecture

What interests me most about projects like this isn't the extravagance or novelty of the individual spaces. It's the degree to which the architecture becomes an expression of the client's particular interests and aspirations.

A workshop designed for someone who genuinely makes things is different from a room labeled workshop on a floor plan. Its proportions, lighting, storage, equipment clearances, ventilation, and connections to adjacent spaces all need to respond to the realities of making. Similarly, a library conceived as a central part of someone's life deserves more consideration than a room with bookshelves along its walls.

When these activities are taken seriously, they begin to influence the building's structure, section, circulation, and relationship to the site. The architecture develops character not through an applied style, but through the particular life it has been asked to accommodate.

This is where the architect's role becomes especially important. A client's imagination may generate an extraordinary set of possibilities, but those possibilities still need to be translated into a coherent building. The task is to discover the underlying relationships among seemingly disparate activities and compose them into an architecture that works practically, spatially, and experientially.

A collection of interesting rooms isn't yet an interesting building.

Agency Requires More Than Resources

It's tempting to associate this kind of ambition exclusively with wealth, but I don't think the two are synonymous. Financial resources certainly expand what's possible, particularly when specialized spaces require substantial infrastructure. Yet I've encountered people with considerable means whose expectations for their homes remain surprisingly conventional.

Agency is something different. It involves a willingness to examine assumptions about how life should be organized and to make deliberate choices about what matters. A person who converts a modest garage into a beautifully considered workshop may be exercising just as much agency as someone commissioning an elaborate private compound.

What distinguishes these clients is that they don't necessarily accept the familiar menu of residential spaces as the limit of what a home can be. They see the home as an opportunity to support the activities, relationships, and experiences they value most.

In that sense, a program-rich house isn't necessarily one with more rooms. It's one whose spaces have been conceived with greater intention.

The Architect as an Enabler

High-agency clients don't always arrive with fully formed architectural ideas. More often, they arrive with an assortment of ambitions, interests, and possibilities that may not yet fit together. Some ideas will prove practical, others will need refinement, and occasionally the most compelling architectural opportunities will emerge from connections neither the client nor the architect initially anticipated.

I believe an important part of our work is helping clients recognize those possibilities. That requires curiosity about their lives, a willingness to ask questions beyond the conventional residential checklist, and enough technical and architectural experience to distinguish an exciting idea from one that may be difficult or unnecessarily expensive to realize.

It also requires judgment. An ambitious program can easily become an unwieldy collection of spaces if every idea is pursued independently. The architect must establish priorities, find opportunities for shared use, organize complex circulation, and create a coherent whole. The goal isn't to indulge every impulse, but to help the client discover which possibilities will genuinely enrich their life.

The best collaborations involve a kind of productive exchange. The client brings ambition, knowledge of their interests, and a willingness to explore. The architect brings spatial imagination, technical understanding, and the ability to transform those interests into a compelling environment.

Neither can accomplish quite the same thing alone.

A Home as an Instrument for Living

I sometimes think we underestimate what a home can contribute to the lives of the people who inhabit it. We tend to evaluate houses through familiar measures: location, size, bedroom count, finishes, views, and resale value. These things matter, but they say surprisingly little about the experiences a house makes possible.

A well-conceived home can encourage someone to pursue an interest they've neglected, spend more time with friends, work with their hands, deepen a collection, or create new family rituals. It can remove the practical obstacles that keep certain activities at the margins of daily life. It can make the things that matter most more accessible, more enjoyable, and more fully integrated into everyday experience.

That's what I find so compelling about designing for high-agency clients. They remind us that a custom home needn't be a more expensive version of something familiar. It can be a highly personal instrument for living, shaped around an individual's particular ambitions and interests.

The most interesting question, then, may not be how many rooms a client needs or how large the house should be. It may be something far more revealing: What would you do with your life if the place you lived were designed to make it possible?