At 18, I got an inside look at how Canada’s most expensive home was designed and built - the Lake Huron Residence by Hariri Pontarini Architects where I interned one summer. The house is insane. It's 26,000 square feet, and has a hidden elevator dropping through the cliff leading to a Bond style tunnel straight into the beach pavilion. But it was the obsessive details that blew my mind: A single piece of laminated glass 15m x 3m, shipped to the lakeside from Germany - the largest ever installed in a home. Custom bronze window frames, paired with matching bronze handrails welded so well you couldn't find the seams. A hand-made wave inspired cedar ceiling by a local artist. Door handles subtly lit by concealed LEDs at night (it gets very dark out there). Custom-cut stone caps for maintenance access to the security cameras. Every inch was crafted to perfection. Tens of thousands of hours of design and engineering work and poured into just one extraordinary home. I left inspired, but also unsettled: All these brilliant ideas and details, this know how and craft, used just once then never repeated again. Isn't that a shame? It felt like a waste of brilliance. Why couldn’t architecture this thoughtful be something way more people could experience? That frustration was one of the sparks behind Cover.

One of the most technically complex Covers we've designed and permitted yet. Extensive site work, tons of competing variables. Excited to bring this one to life.

California is an agricultural powerhouse, but it can be so much more. Cheap water enabled by cheap energy can double irrigated land and 3x fruit and veggie output. Turn grazing grass on prime farmland into orchards and berries. The choke points are pipes, plants, and permits, not physics.

California should be the most agriculturally productive place on earth. We can make energy abundant and desalinate the ocean. Desal tech has advanced considerably, as has solar and nuclear. And the brine can be a feedstock for lithium, magnesium, and other critical minerals. California can pivot from rationing to exporting water-intensive specialty crops, all while decarbonising power and creating a new high-tech manufacturing and agriculture sector on the coast. The bottleneck is not physics – it’s regulatory and execution. We should be letting gigascale solar, batteries and SMRs iterate the way silicon did in the 80s and 90s. Water shortage solved, Central Valley super-charged, new export economy unlocked. Thats the playbook.

America is also absolutely beautiful. These are a few shots I took of California’s wilderness in the last 24 hours. And driving the most American car there is, a @Tesla 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Happy Birthday America! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 I’m an immigrant. Moved here from Canada when I was 18 and never looked back. I’m proud to call America home. America’s loud, flawed, and absolutely brilliant. It’s the best place on Earth to dream big, and work hard to make those dreams real. It is a country with a pioneering spirit. A place of possibility and opportunity. Here’s to the next 249 years of invention, reinvention, and the incredible American spirit. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Happy birthday America. Land of the free, home of the brave... and home of the BUILDER.

Never a dull moment. Sometimes we make clouds while doing some product development and testing at @coverbuild .

LA has better biking weather than Paris. We should have more protected bike lanes too.

Building for the long term is awesome. Requires patience, and focus. When you start seeing the results it’s incredibly satisfying.