Bonsai & the art of leaving out

I grew up in a house where making things was normal. My father is an artist, so I learned early to look at a work and ask what was deliberate and what was left out. That question never left me. It is the same one I ask of a design now: not what can I add, but what can this hold without breaking.

Since 2023 I have kept bonsai. It is a creative outlet and, just as much, a way to find quiet. A tree like this is years of small decisions, most of them about restraint. You do not force the shape. You remove what does not belong, you wait, and you let the tree do most of the work. Growth here is measured in seasons, not sprints, and the discipline is knowing when to stop.

That same care runs into my other work. Through my specialty coffee business I team up with an artist to run workshops: small events where making something by hand, slowly and with attention, is the whole point. Coffee, bonsai, and design turn out to ask the same thing of me. Pay attention, keep what matters, and leave the rest out.

So this corner of the site is where the slower work lives: the pruning, the growing, the making with other people. It is the counterweight to the framing and the systems, and it comes from the same place.