For Paul Ochs, design embraces life. "Good design helps my clients live well," he says.

A passion for science influences Ochs' design sensibility. As a child growing up in Milton, MA, he volunteered at Boston's Museum of Science. A born environmentalist, Paul helped lobby for one of the nation's first bottle bills in the 1970s. The bill eventually passed in Massachusetts in 1981. Before graduating high school, Paul spent a summer collecting flora and fauna samples in the Costa Rican rainforests for the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. The next summer, he worked with Operation Crossroads to raise funds and personally help construct a fisheries facility in the Bijagos Islands of Guinea Bissau, West Africa.

As a student at the University of Vermont in the 1980s, Paul designed his own Environmental Studies major: Environmental Planning and Design. The curriculum included course work at The New School for Social Research's Seminar College (now the Eugene Lang School), University of Michigan's Biological Station, Harvard Graduate School of Design's Career Discovery Program for Urban Planning, New York University and Middlebury College.

He continued land use planning studies with an academic tour of six Northern European countries, followed by a year and a half living in Copenhagen. It was this time spent in Europe that re-oriented Paul's focus to well-planned interiors as well as architecture. He returned to the States and took a job as marketing liaison with the Boston division of Knoll International, a world-renowned furniture manufacturer. Next, he was recruited to come to New York to design for Smallbone, a top end British custom cabinetry firm.

Travel and living in other cultures has furnished Paul with a vast reservoir of visual inspiration and knowledge of handicraft. In addition to Denmark and Guinea Bissau, Paul lived in Alaska, studying geomorphology and landscape evolution. After several years working as an interior designer, he was invited by the Thai government to tour Cambodia and Thailand as a representative of the New York architecture and design community. He has also explored the art, architecture and indigenous handicraft traditions of Greece, Italy, France, Great Britain, Scandinavia, Spain, Argentina, Peru, the Caribbean, Bermuda, Canada, Mexico, Morocco, Laos, Gambia, Senegal, Mali and, most recently, India.

Paul founded Ochs Design in 1989 to express his unconventional philosophy that construction and design are inseparable, just like science and art. Ochs Design's celebration of this union has been recognized by numerous media outlets including Taschen, HGTV, Time Out New York, New York Magazine and New York Living.

more>>