In 2012, I was standing in a client's living room debating which of two nearly identical shades of gray we should use to repaint walls that were already gray. I had just come back from a several month trip to the tropical villages of Borneo, Indonesia, where old men built beautiful stone and bamboo dams in the river to provide communal baths and places for children to swim, where chickens ran through yards and ended up at dinner, where kids ran barefoot on worn dirt paths between homes, where bamboo carried river water to outdoor kitchens, where organic bananas and rice appeared at every meal.
These villages had “less”. Yet, in a sense they were more alive than anything I had ever seen.
I stood in that room and felt the distance between those two worlds. Not anger, longing. I recognized that the village had something the furnished room didn't. An organic connection between people, land, and the work of their hands. I didn't know what to call it then. I just knew I couldn't unfeel it.
That moment didn't send me away from construction. It sent me toward a different kind.
I spent the following years trying to understand what I had seen. I studied intercultural studies and international development, a holistic approach to how communities flourish. I led teams and volunteers to build and restore homes in Mexico, Houston and Corpus Christi. I wrote my senior thesis on environmental stewardship and green building. I took a sustainable agriculture class and discovered the art of permaculture — a design philosophy rooted in working with natural systems rather than against them. I found a thread running through all of it.
The good life is not more. It's connected.
The Blue Flower
When I was starting this company the name Blue Flower came to me and I couldn't explain it. I sat with it.
Shortly after I came across a passage by C.S Lewis where he wrote of becoming a votary of the Blue Flower. A symbol from the German Romantic period. The Romantics used the Blue Flower as a motif of longing — not longing for a thing, but longing for connection to something deeper than the material world. It was a direct response to the Industrial Revolution, a rejection of the idea that the world is merely a collection of resources to be extracted and commodities to be exchanged. The Blue Flower pointed back to beauty, wonder, and the sacred in ordinary life.
That is exactly what I saw in those villages in 2012.
It is also exactly what a well-designed space can do. A garden that produces food. A shed built from scratch by someone who cares how it fits the space. A food forest that takes years to mature. A coop, a compost system, a water harvest — small systems working together the way they were always meant to. These things are not merely decorative. They are restorative. They return something to a person's daily life that the modern world quietly removes — order, presence, and the slow satisfaction of things growing.
That is what Blue Flower is building toward.
The work
My wife and I are certified permaculture designers. We build custom sheds, outdoor features, garden infrastructure, and backyard homestead systems on-site, from the ground up, to whatever a client envisions.
I handle framing, finish carpentry, and paint. Mike, our lead framer, brings decades of experience to every build. My wife, Angela, handles design and shapes the direction of every project alongside me.
We are based in McKinney and serve the surrounding Collin County area.
If something here resonates with you — we'd love to hear what you're imagining for your space.