The most important decisions aren't always the most visible.
Price, square footage, and finishes tell you what a home contains and costs. They reveal much less about how well it will work.
Trace evaluates the relationships between spaces, the needs of the people who will live there, and the tradeoffs built into the plan.
We consider what works, what creates friction, and what can still be improved—whether someone is buying an existing home, planning a renovation, or developing homes for future residents.
We Start With What's Already There
We work from available evidence—floor plans, listings, photos, site plans, walkthroughs, and proposed designs—to understand the home before recommending changes.
We Evaluate Systems, Not Rooms
A home isn't a collection of individual rooms. We examine how circulation, gathering spaces, privacy, storage, and everyday routines work together—and where those relationships succeed or create friction.
We Identify What Is Still Practical to Change
Some decisions are relatively easy to revisit. Others become expensive or disruptive once built. We distinguish between them so attention goes where it can make the greatest difference.
We Identify Who the Plan Actually Serves
Every plan suits some households better than others. We evaluate household fit, changing needs, and the tradeoffs that influence livability, buyer appeal, and long-term usefulness.
Why Trace Exists
In digital design, we spend enormous effort understanding how people interact with the products and services they use. We study behavior, question assumptions, and refine experiences to make them more intuitive, useful, and rewarding.
Yet the place where experience arguably matters most is our home.
It's where daily routines unfold, relationships develop, and memories are made. The decisions shaping those experiences—how spaces connect, how households function, and how a home adapts over time—deserve the same level of consideration.
Trace was founded by David Martinson, whose background in human-centered design includes work with IDEO and clients such as Spotify and Kate Spade New York, across a range of industries.
He created Trace to bring that perspective to residential design: looking beyond how a home appears to understand how it actually performs for the people who live there.
The goal is straightforward: help people live better in their homes while making smarter financial decisions about them. For buyers and homeowners, that means understanding what works, what needs improvement, and which changes justify their cost. For builders and developers, it means creating homes that better serve their intended residents and retain their appeal over time.
Trace Adds a Separate Lens to the Design Process
Architects, builders, developers, and sales teams bring different expertise to a residential project.
Trace complements that work with an independent evaluation of the residential experience: how a plan supports everyday routines, which households it serves, where tradeoffs arise, and how well it can adapt over time.
A review identifies strengths as well as weaknesses. It distinguishes deliberate compromises from avoidable friction and prioritizes the decisions that deserve closer attention.
The Same Questions, Applied Consistently
Every home is evaluated through the same core framework: layout, light, circulation, storage, privacy, outdoor relationships, adaptability, and household fit.
The framework stays consistent, but the evaluation responds to the home, its intended residents, and the decisions being made.
That creates a structured way to assess homes before they're bought, built, renovated, or repeated across a development—without assuming every home or household should work the same way.