Hi, I'm Rafi.
I'm a home designer in Miami, the founder of the Home Design Academy, and a mom figuring out how to do all of it at once. Over the past 12 years I've designed over 100 homes myself and consulted on hundreds more, and honestly, I got here by fumbling through years of trial and error with no clear direction from anyone, piecing it all together from whatever scraps weren't being gatekept. A better way had to be created, one that didn't take years, crazy hours, and tens of thousands of dollars, which is exactly what led me here.
My parents are both architects, and for a while they ran a firm together out of an old Craftsman bungalow they fixed up themselves. They put a playset in the backyard so my brother and I would have somewhere to be, and that's me painting it, with more paint on me than on the playset. We basically lived there.
My mom took us everywhere with her. When I was about four she brought us to the International Builders' Show, and I was completely obsessed with the tile, aisle after aisle of every color and material you could imagine, and I wanted to touch every single piece even though I had no idea what any of it was for yet. By the time I was five and we were living in Tallahassee, I was wandering into her client meetings and sharing my opinions on what they should do with their house, whether anyone asked me or not.
A craftsman studio with a playset out back
Weekends on 30A
My mom was one of the first approved architects in WaterColor on 30A, back when the whole development was maybe four houses, and one of them was hers. So every weekend we'd pack up and drive from Tallahassee to the coast so she could check on her jobs, and while she walked the sites I made friends with the builders, got wheelbarrow rides, and daydreamed about becoming a landscape designer. I didn't choose to spend my weekends on job sites, but I made the best of every one of them, and without even realizing it I was learning how a house comes together, one meeting at a time.
We moved to 30A for good right as I started middle school, and when I was old enough my mom suggested I get a job with a local general contractor. That's where I learned to estimate costs, work alongside the trades, and see everything that happens between a drawing and a finished home. I had zero plans to go into architecture at that point, but I loved that experience and the team I had it with.
Full circle
That little contractor, Arkon Group, has since grown into a developer, and today they're the builder of Lafayette Park at Watersound Origins, a neighborhood of 57 homes that I'm designing.
In the years in between, I went from designing little pool houses at a table in a coffee shop to running a residential design firm with a team and my own brick and mortar office. Now I'm designing 12 different home concepts for this development alone, on land I used to occasionally skip school to go off-roading on with the cool kids in high school, and every one of them is the kind of heritage style, built-to-last home I've always wished we saw more of. What I believe should be built is actually getting built, and that's not something a lot of designers get to say.
When we broke ground, my mom, who always instilled thoughtful design in me, was holding a shovel on one side of me, and my son, who I'm doing all of this for, was holding one on the other, three generations of us out there together in the same sand I grew up playing in, and it's a moment I'll never forget.
Running from it, then running back
Of course I didn't want to do what my parents did, because what 18-year-old does, so I started college in engineering since I had a knack for mathy type things. But I'd written my college essays about walking through Casa Batlló in Barcelona, and I kept finding myself studying for chemistry, physics, and calculus in the architecture library just so I could sneak looks at the architecture books. Then I landed an engineering internship in materials science and figured out pretty quickly that neither corporate life nor engineering was for me, so I ran into the admissions office and asked them to get me out.
I switched to architecture at UF, and that's me on presentation day in my second year standing next to my models. UF doesn't offer a five-year architecture degree though, so finishing there meant a master's and three more years on top of the five I'd already spent in college. Instead I transferred to FAMU, which let me finish a year sooner with the degree I'd need to one day sit for my licensing exams, and the two schools ended up filling each other's gaps, since UF was all about the poetry and aesthetics and FAMU taught me how buildings actually go together.
What still gets me is that in all those years of architecture school, we never designed a single house. We designed hospitals and jails and malls, because schools want their graduates heading to corporate firms or into research and residential design just doesn't fit that picture, so the thing I loved most was the one thing nobody was teaching.
Learning it the long way
So I learned it the long way. In my second year of college my mom's business needed more drafting help than I could keep up with, so I went looking for help, and that turned into a drafting company with a team that reached all the way to Bulgaria. It still runs quietly in the background, and one of those draftsmen still works on my projects today.
After school I worked for two firms and then as the in-house designer for a private family, and every one of those jobs taught me something, but the biggest lesson was that I don't want to work under ideas that are smaller than the work. I wanted to build something where my experience and my judgment make the call. I still have plenty to learn, I just want to learn it on my own terms.
Now
I moved to Miami because I love being outside and I love the warm weather, and I've had friends and family here forever. Last June I signed a lease on a space in Little River, a few doors down from that coffee shop table, and painted the walls myself, and having my own brick and mortar studio still gets me every time I unlock the door.
The projects I'm proudest of right now are Lafayette Park and a spec home in Grand Cayman, because both are what I believe in: homes that are designed well, for people who aren't only the ultra wealthy. And in between all of it, I'm finishing my architecture licensing exams one at a time.
I'm also raising a toddler, mostly solo, and figuring it out as I go. He comes with me more than you'd think, and when I went to the AIA conference with Drawboard, my favorite software, I got to bring him along and we had the best time. So I know what it's like to juggle a life and a dream at the same time, and it shapes a lot of how I teach.
Why I built the Home Design Academy
I've wanted to teach since college, because watching someone else grow is the thing that makes me happiest. I talked about it for years and built the curriculum on the side for years, until one day I just told myself it has to launch.
It started as the Home Designer Masterclass with four students. Twice a week we got on coaching calls that ran two hours or more, and I asked them everything, where they got stuck, what still didn't make sense, what they wished someone had told them sooner, and then I tore the whole program down and rebuilt it around what they told me. That became the Home Design Academy.
What I want is for my students to become better than me, to bring everything they've lived through into their work and design homes that truly serve the families who live in them, because the residential design world gets better every time one of them does. Most days what I do feels like playing, and some days I still feel like that four-year-old in the tile aisle wanting to touch everything. I have a life I love and I don't take it for granted for a second, and I want more people to have that too.