There was always a stranger at our table. My father’s colleagues came from China and Korea and stayed for weeks, and nobody thought that was odd. I learned kung fu in a basement at the Chinese Community Center where no one spoke English, which is a fast way to learn to watch. My best friends had come over from Vietnam with nothing. I noticed how they lived and how we lived, and I never stopped noticing. Weekends were pow-wows in Minnesota and South Dakota: dust, drums, fry bread, whole families under the same sky. Before I had words for it, I understood that a place tells you who belongs in it.
Then came farm country, mid-winter, with the wrong accent. Cutting tobacco in August is the most honest work I’ve ever done: sixty-four hours a week, heat like a wall, and a friend beside me who is still my brother. At sixteen, Mexico City got hold of me for a semester. Markets that ran for blocks. Pyramids older than anything I’d been taught to respect. Balconies and courtyards and doorways that each opened onto another life. I came home and bought a car with field money, cash, and started planning my exit.
I quit college. I left a letter on my door explaining why, which I stand by in spirit if not in tone. The tobacco money got me to Milan, where I learned that a shop window can stop a whole street. Then London, where I saw how old money lives: quietly, in rooms that never have to try. When I ran out of money I came home, played guitar with friends and in small bars, hung art on borrowed walls, and talked my way into dressing department-store windows.
The windows got me hired, and then the road got me. For two and a half years I was on the road opening stores for a young brand, ninety of them. Some nights I was on a ladder with the contractors at 2 a.m. because the doors opened at ten. Then came ten years at URBN, where Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Free People and Terrain went from 140 stores to 400 globally, and Terrain got us into land leases, entitlements, and a whole new sector. I built the studio that designed them. Regent Street. Herald Square. That’s where I learned a store is a performance, and the building is the stage. You feel it the moment you step inside, or you don’t.
New York gave me six years running an international advisory firm, placing brands on the streets I used to wander. We leased Hudson Eats at Brookfield Place, fourteen chefs in one room, and watched a food court turn into a place people chose. Somewhere in there I went back to school, to Oxford. I started weeks before the world shut down and finished in person on the other side. Not everything in those years went to plan. Some doors closed. I closed a few myself. The thing I arranged my life around never changed.
I’m a member of The Explorers Club, which mostly means I’m surrounded by people who make me feel lazy. The Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation honoured me with a warrior blessing, and I’m still working out how to deserve it. Right now I’m helping a crew cross 5,000 kilometres of the Sahel on solar power. I run distances that don’t make sense: two hundred miles once, and a hundred more in the not-so-distant future. I’ve swum ten miles of open water. Most of these efforts land around Veterans Day or support veterans’ causes, because the injuries veterans bring home are mostly the kind nobody sees. It’s why I sit on the boards of INVI MindHealth and the Invisible Wounds Family Foundation.
Now it’s Houston, humid and sprawling and underrated, which suits me. Bureau St. James is where the pieces finally sit at the same table: apps, a serial novel, a book about getting strong with nothing, and software for the people who decide where the next place goes. The belief underneath is the one I picked up at a stranger-filled dinner table that became a friend-filled table in Minneapolis: a place is made by whatever makes people stay.
