Designing a Space for How Your Brain Actually Works: Autonomy, Fit, and Neurodivergence
Release Date: 07/22/2026
Prioritization Beats Productivity: Autonomy, Appreciation, and Culture
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Firms promote their strongest technical people into leadership and then give them almost no training. When a team struggles, leaders often blame the team. Amanda Van Der Heiden has seen this play out across dozens of organizations, and she argues the problem usually starts with how people are being led. Amanda and Bryce talk about how to get to the real reason someone wants out, and how to make core values stick after the launch. They cover how to adapt your leadership style without losing yourself, and what has to be in place before a leader can hand over real autonomy. Amanda explains...
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Nobody at Work Is Your Friend: Relationships, Boundaries, and the Right Fit
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Every career advice list says to protect your relationships. Almost nobody explains what that looks like day to day. Julia Hurley has built a real estate business, a political career, and an athlete management company on relationships, so she knows the how. Julia and Bryce compare matchmaking in real estate and recruiting, and why buyers and candidates are both getting choosier. Julia explains how she teaches college athletes to be the CEO of their own lives by separating the people who support them from the people who manage their money and careers. She shares her rule of thumb for rental...
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Leadership Is a Craft: High-Agency Leadership in AEC
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Most AEC professionals move into leadership without any training for it. Engineering school didn't teach it and architecture school didn't either. So we copy whoever led us and hope it works. Zack Tomlin argues there's a better way, and that architects and engineers are wired to learn leadership as a craft. Zack built Maple Engineering from a two-person operation at a Raleigh public library into a 20-person firm and sold it after 12 years. He explains why leading highly technical experts calls for high-agency leadership instead of command-and-control. He walks through the five levels of his...
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The Leaky Bucket: Why Women Leave HVACR and What Leadership Can Actually Fix
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Bryce just got back from Women in HVACR in Indianapolis, where she spoke to a room full of owners and managers about a number that should keep them up at night: women are leaving the trades at roughly three times the rate they are getting hired into them. Every job fair booth, every high school program, every recruiting push is water poured into a bucket with a hole in the bottom. This is not a DEI session. There is no slide arguing that diversity is good for business. This is a retention conversation built for the owner who has one woman on a crew of nine and cannot figure out why she is...
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The Four Rungs on the Ladder: Why AEC Firms Hire Women and Lose Them Anyway
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Barb Allen spent 20 years on commercial job sites, starting as a carpenter apprentice in 1997 and working her way up to superintendent. She was the first woman her company had ever hired out of college for that track. She left the built environment in 2022 after a meeting where leadership told her she was "difficult to work with," then admitted nobody could say how. That meeting became a book. In OneLadder to Leadership, Barb names four gender specific challenges as rungs on an unsafe ladder: missing, broken, sticky, and slippery. In this conversation she breaks down all four, tells the story...
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Architecture as a Society-Making Tool, Told From a War Zone
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Architecture is usually discussed as a service. A client has a need, a firm delivers a building, everyone moves on to the next project. Dr. Marwa Al-Sabouni makes a harder argument. She says the built environment is one of the strongest forces shaping whether people in a place trust each other, and that the consequences of getting it wrong can take generations to show up. She would know. Marwa is an architect based in Homs, Syria, who stayed through the war and wrote about what she was watching in real time. In this episode she and Bryce talk about how decades of zoning and redevelopment...
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Burned Out and Anxious? What Your Food Has to Do with It and all the Food Recalls
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Episode Summary:In this enlightening episode, we welcome Valerie Hawkins, a dedicated nutritionist and self-concept coach specializing in helping women tackle anxiety, burnout, and overwhelm. Drawing from her extensive background as a working mom and former engineer, Valerie shares her personal journey through the challenges of anxiety and burnout, offering valuable insights into how nutrition can significantly impact mental health and overall well-being.
Valerie’s transformative
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Super-Architect: Craft, AI, and the Future of the Profession
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Architects have been losing ground for years, and the industry keeps explaining it away with fee pressure, schedule pressure, and software. Beau [Last Name] has a less comfortable answer. He says the profession's own craft has declined, and that decline is exactly why architects keep getting moved further from the decisions that matter. His case runs like this. When drawings are incomplete and coordination is loose, somebody has to fill that gap, and lately that somebody is the builder. The builder absorbs the risk, then reasonably takes the authority that comes with it. Beau and Bryce get...
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Stop Playing Small: How a Clear Vision Unlocks Your Career and Life
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
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Designing Care, Not Just Buildings: Healthcare Design and AI
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Great healthcare design is invisible. You feel calmer, you find your way, your family has a place to rest, and you never notice the hundred decisions that made it happen. Kristin Green, a healthcare architect at Earl Swensson Associates (ESa) in Nashville, builds her whole practice around that idea. In this episode, she walks through what it actually takes to design hospitals that balance operational efficiency with genuine, patient-centered care. We get into the human details and the hard tradeoffs. Why she starts every project by leaving her ego at the door. How ESa levels the room so the...
info_outlineRima Nasser founded TEW Design Studio in 2015 because she wanted to design at the level of care she actually believed in, not the level a typical firm structure allowed. That drive for autonomy eventually led her to launch her own furniture collection, TEWlines, in 2024. In this episode, she talks with Bryce about what real ownership over your work looks like, and why "being your own boss" was never really the point.
We also get into something Rima has been thinking about a lot lately: her own ADHD and likely dyslexia diagnosis, and how understanding the way her brain processes space, sensory input, and creative flow changed everything about how she designs and how she leads her studio. She's now pursuing a science in design certification to back up what years of lived experience already taught her. We talk about choosing the right clients, protecting your standards, and what it means to finally understand why you've always worked the way you work.
This one is for designers and creatives thinking about going independent, anyone navigating a late-in-career neurodivergent diagnosis, and leaders rethinking how they build teams and choose collaborators.
About Rima Nasser:
Rima Nasser is the founder and principal designer of TEW Design Studio, a full-service residential and boutique commercial interior design firm based in Raleigh, NC. Since founding TEW in 2015, she's built her practice around designing spaces that fit the people who live in them. Her own neurodivergent diagnosis (ADHD and likely dyslexia) reshaped how she works, leads, and listens to clients, and she's currently pursuing a science in design certification. She holds a master's degree in interior design, has received multiple industry awards, and her work has been published in Kitchen & Bath Business and other trade outlets. In 2024 she launched TEWlines, a curated furniture collection extending TEW's design philosophy beyond individual projects. Originally from Palestine, Rima has been rooted in Raleigh for 15 years.
What We Cover:
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Introduction and Rima's path to founding TEW Design Studio in 2015
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What autonomy actually meant to her beyond "being the boss"
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The decision to launch TEWlines and what it represents
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How Rima chooses clients, and why fit goes both ways
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The hard lessons it took to protect her standards
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Her ADHD and likely dyslexia diagnosis, and how it reshaped her work
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How understanding her brain changed the questions she asks about every space
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Pursuing a science in design certification
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Where to find Rima and closing thoughts
Key Takeaways:
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Real autonomy isn't just ownership of a business, it's ownership of your creative voice, your relationships, and your standards
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Choosing the right client relationship is a skill, and protecting that standard takes time and real boundaries
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A neurodivergent diagnosis later in life can reframe years of how you work, not as something to fix but as information
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Understanding how your own brain processes space and sensory input can directly shape better design decisions for clients
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Lived experience and formal research aren't in competition. Rima is pursuing both
Resources + Links:
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TEW Design Studio: https://tewdesignstudio.com/
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TEWlines: https://tewdesignstudio.com/introducing-tewlines/
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Rima Nasser LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/rimanasser/