I suppose I was a frustrated artist. I like fitting things together, and there are plenty of different ways to do that with real estate.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think of real estate as a little bit like cooking or like art.
My desire to be an artist really came out of being broke and unemployed and incapable of holding a job down. That's what it was driven by for sure.
At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture.
But I found that being an artist and doing accurate work is very difficult.
So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.
Art, like real estate, is half science, half gut. We go to a lot of art fairs. We have two full-time art experts who help me make all the decisions about how to build the corporate and personal collection and what we put in our developments. We don't let interior designers pick art for us.
Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.
I am an architect at heart. I designed every home I've ever had, plus my studio.
I'm an artist, but I'm also a businesswoman, and sometimes you have to play hard.
I think I was very lucky to have grown up with an artist's studio in the house. It was a kind of life that was possible. Yeah, it made it kind of harder because the standards were higher, but there was no pressure.