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Aaron specializes in deeply personal, out-of-the-box design solutions that result in homes that are perfectly suited to the personality, family culture, and lifestyle of each client.
Aaron brings authenticity, boldness, and exceptional attentiveness to each client relationship. He has leveraged his unique personal and professional background to form thought leadership in the design of sustainable, resilient & off-grid solutions. His work has been featured on the architectural podcast “Spaces” and is gaining popularity among entrepreneurs, creatives, and innovators that seek the ideal home environment to supercharge their lifestyle and impact on the world they serve.
Aaron established Sovereign Architecture as a high-touch, low-volume boutique design studio, creating homes for discerning and aspirational innovators seeking to uplift their living environment and break the status quo.
The firm’s guiding mission is rooted in providing an intimately personal, concierge-style design process that results in a truly distinctive, living environment. This approach produces a fusion of each unique client’s individual needs with design elements rooted in the unique site they’ve chosen for their home, all resulting in a truly distinctive, functional and inspiring home.
I was sitting on a park bench, sun on my face, gazing toward the horizon. I knew what I needed to do, and it felt good. Scary… but really good.
It had been exactly one month since I’d walked through the doors of my office for the last time, carrying a cardboard box and that sinking feeling you get when you realize tomorrow won’t be what you were expecting.
In that month, looking back, I’d had several really good interviews. Large well-respected firms, wondering why I was in their office instead of my own. I was qualified, experienced, and motivated… but deep down I felt like I was stepping back onto a very familiar treadmill, just a few blocks down the street from the one I had just stepped off. Each office needed a few months to spool up enough new work to bring me on – “Are you able to wait that long?”
Could I wait that long? We weren’t about to run out of money… close, but not quite. But there was something else down there; something buried below the pragmatism, the formulaic comfort of doing what mature adults do: “Leave one job, go find another.”
Since I was a kid, I’d dreamed of being an architect. As I grew up, and learned more of what that actually meant, I wanted it even more. And I knew I wanted to be the architect… Running my own firm, doing work I loved and having a profound impact on those I served – making the world better.
To get to that point – to be the architect – took grit, and time. Years of school, more years of working experience, licensing exams on every aspect of the profession…I knew it would be a long road, putting in my time, proving myself. And I had the grit to do it, so I set a goal for myself: licensed by age 30. On average, it takes 12-15 years for someone to earn their license to practice as an architect; I would do it in half that.
So I did.
But in all those years of school, work, learning, studying and testing… something happened that I hadn’t been expecting. I got used to not being an architect, but being an employee… To sitting at a desk, and taking orders, and working blindly from one task to the next. I didn’t realize it then, but my dream of being an architect was being choked, strangled quietly, until I was more concerned with how my productivity looked to others, than creating life- and reality-changing work. The fire in my soul was going out.
And all of a sudden, I was sitting on a park bench.
The death of my soul must have been more visible to everyone else than it was to me…
And no one wants an empty shell of an architect lying around taking up desk space.
I had a choice to make. Stick with the familiar, go out and get a job, and make the best of a comfortably predictable, soul-killing routine? Go all-in on not following my dream – again? Or do I take a path that flies in the face of all that, that’s completely, unnecessarily risky, foolish even (not just to me, but to a wife and 4 kids with a powerful need to eat and sleep indoors) – because deep down, I knew what would make me truly feel alive again?
I could see for miles. From my bench on a clifftop, trees with neon-green spring leaves stretched off toward the horizon, punctured by hundreds of housetops and two bright red silos, until the blur of trees marching away halted in a line at a double horizon streak of deep blue water. And climbing out of the water, clawing its way up over the horizon, I could see the skyline of Toronto, 60-some miles away. The sun was shining, the warm breeze drifting through the trees, the birds chirping disappearing melodies.
That was years ago… And the journey since then has been so much more than I’d expected. Harder. Scarier. More amazingly fulfilling. Everything I’d dreamed it would be, and more… Blah, blah blah.
Because that’s how the entrepreneurial path goes: it’s the embodiment of every cliche, truism, and platitudinal meme out there, but in gut-wrenching, all-encompassing personal reality.
As my mindset transitioned from employee-drone to entrepreneur – transitioned back, really – I realized just how far I’d let life carry me away from my true self. I discovered how to unlock and harness my intuitive, creative genius, and tap resources never available in my 9-to-5 grind. I found my personal “golden hours” for working, spending time with my family, biking, reading and personal growth…
And all of a sudden my daily routine looked nothing like a day job. Work, play, and rest all flowed beautifully around one another: I had passion for my work, time for my family, and ample opportunity to pursue all the different facets of what was important to me.
And there’s no going back. I couldn’t trade that for all the comfort, predictability, or routine my old life could have ever offered – not after getting the taste of life on my own terms.
I think that’s the draw for so many entrepreneurs: breaking out of the mold, doing something that matters in the way it’s done best…
On a fundamental level, the transformation I went through is the same path so many visionaries walk, over and over…
Starting with a big dream; slowly getting pulled off-track by semantics and minutae; hitting that crisis-moment; and choosing to pivot and correct to the course aimed audaciously at the big dream, more self-aware and resolute than at the start.
And the cycle isn’t solely for business goals. It happens to most big-thinkers throughout their lives… including where they choose to live. But that’s the iterative nature of most big, audacious change: the process is probably completely foreign to you, and a little bit daunting.
Every client I start to work with is usually at the same stage I was at, metaphorically sitting on that park bench – the only difference is that they are not considering their career. They are deciding where they want to live – their homebase for work, play, and rest. They’re deciding whether to stick with what’s familiar – to keep investing in not what they really want – or to make a serious pivot, and launch onto that bold, unique, personal path heading toward their dream – and create a home that’s designed for exactly that.
I see every one of my clients sitting where I sat – only I’m sitting next to them, ready to guide and help them along the way. That’s my passion: helping people like me – people like you – through an unfamiliar, uncomfortable, intimidating process that results in the perfect place to live every facet of your ideal life.
I created Sovereign Architecture because I get what you’re going through. And because doing what I do, with people like you, is what I love.
