Make Room for Growth
When I moved from Brazil to Seattle, I had a carry-on and one big suitcase. That was it. Everything I owned fit into two bags, and I carried them off a plane into a city where I barely knew anyone, didn't know the streets, and was starting completely from scratch.
There's something clarifying about that kind of beginning. When you have almost nothing, you notice very quickly what a space gives you — or doesn't. Whether it feels safe. Whether it helps you breathe. Whether it makes you feel like you could belong there, or like you're just passing through.
I had been a teacher in Brazil. I knew, in a textbook kind of way, that environments matter — that the room a child learns in affects how they learn. Montessori educators design classrooms where children can reach their own materials, make choices, and move freely. Waldorf spaces are full of natural light and soft textures. The environment, they say, is also the teacher.
But it wasn't until I moved to Seattle — and then to San Francisco, and working as a nanny inside other people's homes — that I understood what that really means in everyday life.
I watched it up close. Families who loved each other deeply, living in homes that were quietly making everything harder. Toys everywhere, no real place for anything, kids who couldn't wind down because there was nowhere calm to land. Parents who walked in at the end of the day and felt their shoulders go up instead of down.
And I watched what happened when something small changed. A shelf was lowered so a child could reach it herself. A corner was cleared and made soft. A kitchen reorganized so the morning routine stopped feeling like a crisis. The difference wasn't dramatic. It was just — easier. Calmer. Like the house had stopped fighting the family and started helping them instead.
I think about my two bags a lot. Moving with so little taught me that a home isn't about how much you have in it. It's about what the space says to you when you walk in. Whether it tells you: you're capable, you're calm, you belong here.
Most homes don't say that. Most homes say: get through the morning, survive the evening, don't look too closely at the pile by the door.
That's why I started Casa & Co. — to take everything I learned as a teacher, and as someone who's built a life in new places from almost nothing, and use it to help families build homes that actually support them. Not perfect homes. Not expensive homes. Just homes that feel intentional. That feel like someone thought about how this family actually lives.
It often starts with something small. A shelf. A corner. One honest look at what your home is currently teaching you — and deciding you'd like it to say something different.
