How a place makes you feel.

I've always been enamored with how places make you feel, and everything that goes into it: the smell when you walk in, the light, the sound of the floors, the way the table is set, the people who've looked after it for years. You feel it before you can put it into words. To me, that's the rising of a place, and it's what I look for everywhere I send someone.

I was born in Arkansas and grew up moving: Dallas, Connecticut, Australia, and back to Dallas in time to graduate. By eighteen, I'd learned how to find my footing in a new place and make it feel like my own. Everywhere I lived had its own idea of how to live well, from my grandmother's kitchen in Arkansas to a school on the other side of the world. I can usually tell, within a conversation, what will make someone feel looked after, and it's rarely the thing with the highest price.

At Boston University I studied international relations, with semesters in London and Geneva, and summers teaching English in Tibet and working with small businesses in Mali. Those summers taught me that the most interesting thing about a place is usually the people who keep it alive.

In Los Angeles I assisted a motion picture agent at CAA, where I learned to anticipate needs and how much happens behind the scenes to make things run smoothly. Then I became the first hire at Gray Malin, working out of his garage to build the business: the website, the team, collaborations with Le Méridien and Sperry. I spent time traveling with Gray on shoots from Rio to Bhutan to Ethiopia, sometimes leaning out of a helicopter for the aerial shoots. I came away with a respect for the work behind things that look easy.

A day at Babylonstoren, in South Africa's Cape Winelands, changed my direction. Everything there belonged together, and I didn't want to rush on to the next thing. I left my job to build something of my own. It never launched. In the quieter years that followed, I explored, researched, rested and recalibrated. I even helped archive more than a century of history at my family's Coca-Cola bottling company in Arkansas, and came away with a deep respect for people who give their lives to one thing.

I found my way back through the things that always bring me back to life: a swim off the rocks in Mallorca, a long lunch, a garden, a city on foot. For my fortieth, I rented a flat in Chelsea for three weeks and explored London neighborhood by neighborhood.

That trip pulled together what I'd been circling for years: the way certain places make you feel, a fascination with hospitality, and a curiosity about the world that has never let up. A few months later, Ortus Loci was born: a travel advisory that designs each trip around two things, the person and the place.