Hi, I’m Joy.

I want to give you a little background on my story and how my thoughts and this site developed.

My family were farmers and church planters in the Atlanta area since long before the Civil War. They were sharecroppers who intermarried with the local natives and other low status people living close to the earth. I remember my great-grandparents well. Fred and Ollie. They were young themselves with more than a handful of little ones when the Great Depression hit. They struggled to provide for their family. My grandmother said she didn’t have shoes for a few years. Fred drove a donkey cart into the city and sold coal on Peachtree Street when it was still a dirt road. But they had a little land and knew how to live off of it.

I grew up in a fairly rural suburb of Atlanta called Snellville. I remember my favorite trees to drive by. I watched those favorite trees slowly be replaced with generic strip malls and six-lane highways where the cars can hardly even move. As I went out into the world I saw other ways of living. Very different ways. From isolated, ancient, moneyless ways of living with a remote tribe in the Amazon basin and villages in the Andes, to “poor” and “normal” villages and cities all over the Americas, Europe, and some in the Middle East. My work has also taken me to some of the “finest” places on earth. Resorts, Michelin restaurants, castles, private islands, and the private estates of people on the Forbes list throwing their most lavish parties. 

Going out into the world and coming back to Snellville, I’d look around and think, We can do better than this. It got me thinking about how to do better than this. How could we build a really beautiful place to live near Atlanta, Georgia? How could we build off the cultural richness this place in the world has to offer us, leaving behind the parts that don’t serve us, and injecting it with better practices we can recover from other parts of the world? How can we recover the wisdom of the past and infuse the helpful parts of contemporary technology? How can we determine what are the “good” parts worth keeping or picking up from other places and what are the “bad” parts that aren’t serving us? How can we build from the wealth of practice “poor,” “normal,” and “lavish” places have to teach us?

I’ve read a lot, watched a lot of documentaries, taken courses at Harvard, and done a lot of observing. I don’t claim to know all the answers but I’ve given them a lot of thought, I have some opinions, and more importantly, I’ve developed better and better questions and frameworks for those questions. 

This site is a general overview of “my” point of view of how to make beautiful places. Very few thoughts here are original but rather the framework for how I think about things based on so many ideas I’ve gathered and sifted. I tried to write it in a way that doesn’t overwhelm by going into too much detail and generally enough so the ideas could be applied to any scale project in any part of the world. 

I offer this to help raise the conversation. I believe in living more beautifully. I think it’s the path to healing.

CV