Today we’d like to introduce you to Nadia Palacios Lauterbach.
Nadia Palacios, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I grew up in Nicaragua. My parents were retired teachers and owned a bookstore, I grew up surrounded by books, reading them, playing with them, and building structures with them and the boxes in which they came. My dad was a history professor and instead of fairy tales at night he would tell me his favorite passages of history, Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Alexander the Great conquests, or the last stand against the Spaniards of our great chief Diriangen. Each story was associated with a place and each place had a unique architecture that fascinated me, so during the day I would look up in their books those places my dad had spoken of at night and I grew up loving buildings as well as books.
After high school, I moved to Chicago where my older brother was just finishing college and lived with him for almost two years learning English, taking the SAT, and applying to college. I attended the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame where I studied all those places my dad had spoken of and even got to see many of them in person during my year abroad in Italy. My senior year, I met the cutest engineering student, John Lauterbach from Houston, and we started dating.
After graduation we moved to Chicago where I worked two years for a small studio that specialized in high-end Residential Architecture but eventually John got a job offer at NASA and convinced me to follow him back to Houston. I was skeptical at first because Chicago was so wonderful and urban, we lived in a beautiful neighborhood just blocks from the lake and I had family there, but the NASA opportunity was really amazing and we couldn’t pass it so we moved and soon after got married. Now we have two boys and a dog.
I started work at Curtis and Windham Architects which also specializes in very high-end residential work and spent four years there as an architectural designer until, at the height of the Recession, I got laid off. Fortunately, John still had his job at NASA and he encouraged me to just take a break and regroup. I had spent six months on my couch looking for work and becoming more and more despondent at the lack of prospects when a friend of mine asked me for advice to remodel her office. Now, many people had asked me for advice, free advice, but this friend offered to pay me and that gave me the idea of starting my own business, which I did, with one client, one drafting table, and one computer in my living room.
This October was ten years since that friend asked me for help and now I have three employees a list of clients of who is who in Houston and our work has won awards and has been published in House Beautiful Magazine, Luxe Magazine, Paper City, Southern Living, and Houston Magazine.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It was not easy at first because Residential Architecture is a social profession in which you acquire clients through referrals and word of mouth. Being an immigrant without roots in Houston made getting into social circles very challenging at first, but Houston is a very welcoming city and I am very extroverted so eventually I had made new friends and new connections that led to more and more meaningful projects.
Nadia Palacios Residential Design – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
We specialize in high-end residential design and we create beautiful houses tailored to perfection to the lifestyle and desires of each client. We are known for our attention to detail and the discipline we bring to the design process. We spend a lot of time in the field supervising construction and communicating with the crews and craftspeople to ensure that what we’ve designed is executed accordingly.
What sets us apart is how I approach design. Creating a home for someone is an intimate process, so I need to become friends, so to speak, with my clients to understand the inner workings of their life, their family dynamics, their daily rituals. I also believe that collaboration makes for a better project, so I assemble a good team from the beginning (Interior Designer, Landscape Architect, and Contractor) and I mediate between all the other professionals so that all aspects of the project are coordinated.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Success for me is the ability to choose your projects. At the beginning, you take anything that comes your way regardless of whether it matches your design sensibilities or not, but when you’re successful you have the luxury of picking only the ones where you can really flourish and make a difference.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.nadiapalacioslauterbach.com
- Phone: 713-818-4066
- Email: info@nadiapalacioslauterbach.
com - Instagram: @nadiapalaciosdesign
- Facebook: Facebook/dearpolia
Image Credit:
Photography by Tria Giovan and Jack Thompson
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