Our Vision:
At MKDB we’re all about harmony: in our designs, in our relationships with our clients colleagues and crafts people, and with our community and planet. We believe elegance in design incorporates beauty, ease of use, environmental sustainability, financial feasability and is ultimately humanly restorative.
Our Process:
Listening, Designing And Building
Working with you, we observe how and where you currently live and listen to what you need and how you would like to live in order to envision a home that is a perfect fit for you. Through our seamlessly integrated design/build process, we carefully craft your vision in a process that values the aesthetics and subtlety that inform the design as much as it values efficiency, sturdiness, and fine craftsmanship in the construction. Because of our commitment to excellence in both design and construction, we even thought about calling the company “construction couture” but we did not settle on this name because it has an elitist connotation that is anything but us.
Flexibility and Resourcefulness
At MKDB, we believe that transforming spaces is a fluid, evolving process. The beauty of deisgn/build is that it opens up windows of opportunity to elevate the design through out the process that usually get lost in the static lineal division between design and construction services. Our fluid process results in dynamic, vibrant, and harmonious creations, as our portfolio illustrates.
Building Homes and Communities
We consider it our privilege to build your dreams, transforming mere shelter into a home that is a place of refuge, sustenance and delight. It’s our hope that by sharing this talent we have for interpreting your needs into spaces that work for you, you’ll be fortified and have more to give to your family, your community and our world. We hope our work with you will be a gift to your community, inspiring excellent, conscientious design, and evoking delight. At MKDB we are committed to community building and fostering sustainable, regenerative values so that together we can heal or communities and our world.
Having Fun and Creating Friendships
Our objective is to make the design/build process enjoyable and fun for you. We delight in getting to know our clients and learning their quirks and interests. We cherish the connections we make, and hope to stay friends even after our work together is complete. In fact, desiring to better describe the exceptional relationships we have with our clients, we invented the term “flient” to refer to our clients who have also become our friends.
Elements We Consider When Designing Your Home
Beauty
Beauty is one of the most sustainable elements of a design; when we have created something beautiful, our whole world aspires to preserve it. In health and wellness terms, this could be called self-image or cultural identification. In the design world it might be called taste, style, or aesthetic. We like to think of it as simply beauty: that unexplainable emotional resonance that occurs when something in the world communicates with you and stands as a symbol of who you are. For this reason, we never subscribe to a style, but rather we commit ourselves to finding a style that fits each of our clients. How this affects your health is as immeasurable as beauty itself, but when it’s right, it lifts your spirit every day.
Water
Water is soothing, cleansing, refreshing and thirst quenching, and the source of all life. Even a modest bathroom can be an oasis of soothing calm in our hectic so very busy lives. Hot tubs, swimming pools and ponds can be a source of delight and relaxation. Water harvesting can be elegantly incorporated into any home, while rain gardens and landscapes that retain water on the land offer exciting and beautiful design opportunities. Everything from dual flush toilets to water purifiers and living machines for grey water recycling can be explored to find the opportunities that best suit your lifestyle.
Food
Having a kitchen you love to cook in that is also a comfortable space to share meals with family and friends can makes it easier to eat well. We design to make gardening, cooking, storing food, composting and recycling easy. The kitchen is the very heart of our homes and we are staging a bit of a revolution: at MKDB we want to bring the couch back into the kitchen, in spirit if not always in form, to create a hub that fosters harmony in your life. We’ve designed an exciting and innovative line of movable, adjustable kitchen furniture that truly invites interaction and ease; all soft geometry and elegance to suit you, rather than the traditional commercial bank of cabinets that suit the ease of manufacturers. A kitchen revolution awaits you! Ask us about it PLEASE!
Peace
I’m learning from a friend who is healing from cancer that it’s not stress that is the problem, it’s feeling overwhelmed and powerless. Imagine how empowering and restorative it would feel to come home to a place of refuge, peace and delight. Our homes should be a place where we can unwind and relax. At MKDB can create that. Holistic, harmonious design and process may incorporate individual, private spaces; soothing, spa-like environments; and great friendly rooms for everyone to hang out in together. Sensitive views, quiet landscapes, sound separations, color selections, materials textures and shapes can all reduce stress. Carefully designed storage can reduce clutter while making things easier to find, or ignore. A client once told me of the vistas he’d like designed into his new addition. His eyes would glass over a little as he looked off into an inner landscape of what I can only imagine was spacious and austere, like a prairie that stretched on for miles, or nothing but ocean … We were actually sitting in the dining room of his row house in a newish subdivision, in a suburb, looking into a back yard of white vinyl siding and mini yards delineated by pressure treated, “friendly” fence panels with diamond lattice on top as far as the eye could see. I suggested we create a smaller second floor on the addition accessed only off the master bedroom, a quiet space away from the busyness of his twin nine-year-old girls. Then I suggested we put some skylights and transoms in it and his eyes lit up. At MKDB there’s always a way because we listen to your needs.
Relationships
Perhaps nothing defines our happiness more than our relationships. And your home can be designed as a place of gathering that encourages interaction within your family. Today’s homes can go from one to ten inhabitants in a matter of days, and they all may have very different ways of living. Thoughtful design can foster harmony in all these interactions and relationships: think of King Arthur’s round table. We’re thinking on this level all the time at MKDB. Architecture has the power to transform, inform and facilitate wondrous things when it is intentional.
Aging in Place
Just like our families grow and change, so must our homes. Good design can provide flexibility and equity for people of all ages, stages of life, and disabilities. This is sometimes called universal design. Incorporating universal design principals into your home is a pretty sure thing in terms of return on investment and quality of life. Often it’s just really good design and one wouldn’t even know we were thinking about it all along. At MKDB we’re always thinking… Traffic flows, access, smooth transitions between floors; furniture selections, cabinet heights, hardware, light switches, and plumbing fixtures… we can make it all user friendly. Back strain, arthritis, and joint pain can be a part of life, but good design can minimize their impact so you can live comfortably.
Air
We spend about 90% of our lives indoors and estimates of air pollution in the average home is two to five times higher than outside, where it’s not so great either. We’re trying to fix that. At MKDB are improving our outdoor air quality through our community involvement and sustainable building and business practices. We’re improving indoor air quality with everything from the paint we use, to discovering the best ways to encourage air to move through your whole house. We’re also thinking about the smaller, often forgotten stuff like furnishings and fabrics, building materials and mechanics. Our gorgeous outdoor “rooms” — pagodas, sculptural decks, screened porches — are some of our favorite commissions, since they allow you to enjoy the wonders of nature in a cozy urban setting sheltered from the elements. When we are more connected with nature, we believe we are also more committed to preserving it.
