WALDEN LANIER JONES
I draw, design, and build digital and physical spaces. Lately that’s meant websites, illustrations, and helping creative people bring their projects to life.
I was born to two architects, but I tried desperately not to become one. I thought I’d be a cook. After a year of working in a fine dining restuarant and climbing limestone in Mexico—my curiosity (and maybe those design genes I tried to ignore) eventually pulled me into architecture school.
That road led me to my dad’s firm, Jones Pierce Architects, where I learned from a crew of generous, detail-obsessed designers. But the firm’s website didn’t match the quality of their work, and I couldn't stand it. So I taught myself web design in WIX Studio and rebuilt it from scratch ⟶. Designing a website for designers was its own challenge—strong opinions everywhere, and all of them right in their own way. But it taught me how to build brands for creatives who, with enough time, could probably do an incredible job themselves.
About an hour after we finally got the Jones Pierce site to a place everyone liked, my dad came to me with another idea: a new brand, a new process, built for people who care about resilience and long-term value. That became HODL House. Now, eight months in, I’m continuing to interview clients, write their life patterns, design their life pattern cards, and draw perspectives of their dream homes to help guide them toward what they really want to build.
While HODL House was still in development, I asked my dad to bring on a friend I met while studying in Barcelona: Cayleigh. I was the only one in the office with a graphics background, and trying to build a brand with no one to bounce ideas off was proving impossible. Cayleigh joined and everything clicked. They're an incredible illustrator, writer, and graphics guru, and their precision and my chaos balance in the best way. I tend to push designs too far, and Cayleigh knows how to rein them in. Back in school, we both obsessed over how architecture presentations were laid out, and the conversation between text, drawings, and imagery. Architecture has so many layers: sketching, iterating, modeling, drafting. And somehow, all of it needs to come together in the end and tell a clear story to actually convince someone it works. That shared care for how design feels on the page has translated naturally into websites.
Lately, I’ve been collaborating with Cayleigh to design websites and even take on built projects that blend illustration, storytelling, and architecture. Whether digital or physical, the goal is the same: thoughtful, efficient design that helps people succeed at what they’re building.
If that sounds like something you’d want to collaborate on, send me a email at hello@waldenlanierj.com.