After years in high-tech at the dawn of the internet, I started an e-commerce company bringing emerging design from France and their products to the US. In 2002, the US was a design no man’s land - that's in part why I started my company. I saw so many beautiful yet affordable things in Europe, but had a hard time furnishing my own home in San Francisco.  By 2005, our customers included the MoMA in New York, W hotels and about a hundred stores around the US; but also design aficionados who bought directly from our website. Products we launched were featured in traditional media like The New York Times and House&Gardens as well as in the freshly emerging world of design (web)logs - as blogs were called at the time - Design Sponge, DailyCandy, Treehugger and many more.

But throughout this journey, I found a new passion beyond decor: rethinking spaces altogether, using my own home as a field of happy experimentation. My husband and I started our never ending journey of remodeling and building houses by gut-remodeling a 1903 Historic Edwardian in San Francisco: reconfiguring the entire floor-plan, designing kitchen, bathrooms, adding (and removing) walls and windows and going as far as building a 3-car garage underneath our historic four-story house.

After completing this first project, I was hooked. Since then, I designed multiple houses and apartments as well as several startup offices. Above all, my favorite projects are the homes I designed and built for our family: A Sonoma Wine Country Escape, our Connecticut Weekend Home and our main residences, first in San Francisco, then in New York - all featured on this site.

Apart from designing homes, I am also a fine art photographer (www.carinemagescas.com) and an investor in technology startups (www.angelpad.org). All these endeavors might seem disconnected - and they kind of are - yet I enjoy them all immensely and they very much define me.