About

I started working at my father's architectural firm Rueden, Reynolds & Associates in the 1980s. At this early stage, my father wanted to teach me the business and the craft of designing buildings. I learned by doing. In the office at that time, we designed restaurants, industrial sites, shopping centers, apartments, and churches but the main focus of the firm was custom homes. We designed homes tailored to specific lots and families and the occasional speculative builder.

On the business side, he took me to his meetings with clients, building committees, city officials, engineers, and of course out on the site of the projects being built. This is was a great experience for me. I learned how to talk and listen to each one of them and to make sure that the project was moving in the direction that the client anticipates.

On the craft side, he spent a great deal of time teaching me not only how to draw, but to understand what I was drawing. He also instilled upon me that the purpose of our drawings was to convey information. Our drawings should help our clients to understand what the project would look like when completed. Contractors also relied on our work to understand how the building goes together. It just wasn’t a bunch of pretty pictures. We came up with a term for this: "Foreman on Paper".

As time went on, we decided to put everything that we were talking about and doing down on paper. This included the design principles that my grandfather and great grandfather taught him. What we came up with was a long list of principles and design methods. We called it Timbrin Principles, which means to build in Old English. I follow these principles to this day.

The homes on this website follow the Timbrin principles. Please click on the photographs to learn more about some of the homes I’ve designed in the past. I hope you enjoy the work my family's principles have brought to the table and choose to help me further five generations of life's work. 

-Anthony L. Rueden