I didn’t grow up with home comfort as a given. I grew up off-grid, in rural Montana, without electricity, telephones, or running water. In the winters, keeping the house warm meant splitting wood and not letting the fire in the stove die out. Having water for cooking and bathing meant chopping through the creek ice and hauling five-gallon buckets up to the house. For lights we lit candles and kerosene lamps and ran low watt halogen bulbs off of car batteries until they ran low on juice and had to be charged up in town.

This upbringing gave me a respect for energy. Not just fuel, but the entire system: how things move, what they depend on, where it all comes from, what happens if you don’t have enough. It also gave me deep appreciation for all that thethat natural world provides to keep us alive. 

Early on, I was also exposed to other worlds. Other ways of living. Starting at age nine I would fly by myself to spend alternating summers in LA and New York to visit grandparents on my dad’s side. A lone connection to my father who died when I was young. The experiences were a stark contrast to life in the mountains. One world ran on infrastructure. The other ran on effort.  One world was covered in cement, blacktop, and overflowed with people and energy. The other our nearest neighbor lived three miles away and when the lights were blown out the night filled with sounds of owls, blackness, the moon and stars. The split reality of peak urban and rural life helped me see how much of our lives are shaped by invisible systems—and how many of these systems seemed to be harming both people and the planet. It made me obsessive about fixing broken systems. Not just patching them, but rethinking them. 

When I was eleven I wrote a time capsule letter to myself. It predicted that Future Me would be a famous inventor. I would invent scrubbers for factories and drive cars that looked like old classics but had nothing coming out of the tail pipe. 

As much as I was drawn to science, engineering, and math,) I had an equally deep interest in the arts. I was into drawing, painting, and writing. I wrote a play that my 5th grade class went on to produce and put on for the school's annual holiday show.  

For many many years I struggled with focusing both my right and left brain. Sometimes I would dive into technical pursuits physics, engineering, and math but end up feeling trapped, surrounded by un-creative walls.  Other periods I would spend consumed by telling stories, creating art, but feel without the agency control of my own destiny and success.

I dropped out of engineering school when I looked into the future and it seemed without inspiration. I dropped out of film school when I needed to work full-timefull time so I could save up enough money to make my final project.  I ran photo labs.  I started a photography business.  

It wasn’t until I became an entrepreneur and had my first start up that I felt my passion for art and science coming into alignment. I bootstrapped a new product company, a premium lifestyle audio brand. I developed new manufacturing methods. I forged partnerships with the biggest brands in the world.  Before we were truly ready we were acquired.  And working for the new new business I learned many things I would emulate for running a larger successful business and many things I would never do when nurturing and launching a new brand.

After that I went back to my core dedication to system change and complex, audacious ideas because they needed to exist. Because they had the power to change broken systems. 

Years later, I bought my first house with my partner.  Like most homeowners, I inherited. But I didn’t want to just swap in another gas furnace or clunky mini-split. I started researching.

That’s when I stumbled across hydronics. Heating and cooling with water made perfect sense—efficient, quiet, adaptable. I even found a company building systems that aligned with the vision. But when I tried to get it installed? No dice. No one would touch it. Too complicated, too unfamiliar.

So I did what I’ve always done. I got stubborn. I decided to build it myself.

It was hard. But it was also thrilling. For the first time, I was using everything I knew–about the value of energy, the importance of system design, the need for beauty and function. Hydronics wasn’t just better technology, it was a better philosophy.

That obsession turned into a conviction. If we were going to make this kind of system accessible, we’d have to do more than build better tech. We’d have to reimagine the entire business model: installation, control, service, financing. All of it.

That’s why I founded Aris. We’re here to make home comfort intelligent, resilient, and deeply respectful of energy, because I’ve lived both the fragility and the promise of good systems.

Thanks for following along as we bring that vision to life.

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