What I Built When Everything Fell Apart
I gave birth to my son Nigel in May 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic. New York was quiet in a way that didn't feel peaceful; it felt like holding your breath. We had already stopped going to the office, and I stopped working one week before delivery.
The birth went well. It was a natural delivery, everything as it should be. Then I went home, and within 24 hours I had an infection. I went back to the hospital, where I had a stroke.
My husband was at home with Nigel, and my family couldn't come to see me. I was alone in the ICU for a week, with nothing but empty streets outside my window.
I survived, but I came home with a black, blurry patch in the right side of my vision. I'm an architect, and my vision is how I think, how I read a space, how I draw, how I imagine what isn't there yet but might be possible. Nobody could tell me if my vision was going to come back, or to what extent, or when.
During my maternity leave, my firm received a new job—a small residential project in Nàpoles, Ecuador, nothing huge. Under normal circumstances I probably wouldn't have taken it. After all, I was supposed to be resting, recovering, and being a new mom.
But I needed it. I really needed it. I needed to draw something, think about something, be an architect again, even just for the small pockets of time when Nigel was sleeping. I needed my passion back and I needed to feel like myself.
So I took it, and the project became my savior. That's the only way I can describe it. I was nourishing two babies that year: Nigel, and Nápoles House. Both needed me to show up, and both gave me a reason to.
What I love most about this project is that it never tried to be more than it was—no fancy mechanical systems, no over-engineered solutions, just good design and good materials. We relied on local brick, metal, and earth-based finishes, working with the land, with the climate, with what was already there.
I was raised to think holistically, that you can't look at one part without understanding the whole, and architecture is the same. A building is not just its structure, or its systems, or its aesthetics; it's all of them together, and the land underneath, and the people inside, and the community around it. Everything is connected, and when one thing is off, the whole feels it.
Motherhood was teaching me the exact same thing at the exact same time. When you're a new mother everything feels overwhelming. There’s so much information to consume, and so many fears you face, but it's actually very simple underneath all of that. Feed your baby, be there, and trust that nature knows what it's doing. You don't need to control every single thing; you just need to show up and be present.
Nápoles House was also a community project in a very real way. During the pandemic so many people in Ecuador had lost work, and we were able to keep local craftspeople and laborers employed in and around the site, working together on something. That mattered a lot to me, because nobody was just doing a job. We were all in something together.
At home it was the same. My family couldn't be there with me physically, but they were there to support me. My husband was my foundation. Phil, my partner and principal, was incredibly supportive, and the whole team was my village. You can't do motherhood alone, and you can't do architecture alone either.
By the time Nápoles House was finished, things had shifted. The blurry patch in my vision got better—not completely, but enough—and the anxiety started to loosen its grip on me. The postpartum darkness that nobody really warned me about started to lift.
I don't think that's a coincidence. Designing that house gave me something to hold onto when everything else felt unstable. It reminded me I could still create, still think, still build something beautiful, and that mattered more than I can explain.
Nigel grew, Nápoles House got built, and somewhere in between all of that, so did I.
I'm sharing this because I don't think we talk enough about what it actually takes to recover, to show up, and to keep creating when everything feels uncertain. Nápoles House is a beautiful, honest home in Ecuador, but for me it will always be more than that.
It was the project that got me through.
Nandar Dinneen