As a kid, that meant building haunted houses in the garage and recruiting the neighborhood kids to scare trick-or-treaters. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I was already fascinated by the same question I still ask today:

How do you create something people don’t just see, but actually feel?

How I got here

I started my career designing luxury homes in New York City. Architecture taught me how space influences behavior — how scale, sequence, light, material and movement can shape the way someone feels.

From there, I moved into hospitality design and eventually joined Rockwell Group, working across hotels, resorts, restaurants, nightclubs, members clubs, theater and experiential events around the world.

What drew me to hospitality was the why. A space wasn’t simply meant to be beautiful. It had a story, a personality and a point of view. Every decision had to reinforce the experience the brand wanted someone to have.

While at Rockwell, I also became the classic New Yorker who thought my friends and I could throw better parties than everyone else.

So we shot our

We started producing underground events on the Lower East Side with one ambition: make the experience itself so compelling that the night already felt like an adventure.

There was no real line between audience and performer. Immersive actors, painters, performance artists, musicians and DJs all existed within the same world, with guests becoming part of it rather than simply watching.

Those parties became Pew Pew Presents. Brands began hiring us to create experiences for them, and eventually I left architecture to focus on Pew Pew full-time.

Then COVID changed the plan.

Instead of expanding internationally, I bought a sailboat despite knowing almost nothing about sailing and spent a year working my way along the U.S. coast with friends joining along the way.

That journey brought me to Miami as the city was reopening.

There, I created Pew Pew Miami, a temporary nightlife and cultural space that became a live laboratory for guest experience. In one month, we produced 16 events, welcomed more than 8,000 guests and generated nearly $800,000 in revenue.

I could watch people experience something, change one element the next night, and immediately see how their behavior changed.

It pushed me to think beyond the environment and into the complete experience: anticipation, arrival, interaction, participation, energy and memory.

Connecting the whole experience

That thinking continued with Call Me Lola, the cultural platform and gallery I founded in Mexico City to bring people closer to the stories behind art and the artists who create it.

Running Pew Pew and Lola taught me something architecture alone never could: A physical experience doesn’t begin when someone walks through the door. It begins when they first hear about it.

Brand, graphic design, marketing, language, digital touchpoints, programming, environment and human interaction all shape the same experience. When they reinforce one another, the world becomes much more powerful.

Being a founder also meant those ideas had to work as a business. I had to think about audiences, revenue, operations, growth and whether a creative idea could actually sustain itself and scale.

All of those lessons eventually became the way I work today: looking at an experience as one connected system and continually asking:

What should someone feel here? What should this moment communicate about the brand? And how can it create value for both the audience and the business?

That’s the thread connecting everything I’ve done — from architecture to hospitality, underground parties to cultural platforms, physical environments to brands.

The medium keeps changing.

The goal hasn’t.