How do you distinguish yourself inside a family of accomplished musicians? If you’re Brian Scheuzger (CQ), you take up drawing. And my gosh, the places he went with paper and pencil! He drew sections through anthills. He created houses with secret passages. He invented cookie factories tracing all the steps along the line to making a cookie. And when two dimensions seemed limited, he used Lego blocks. No wonder that in high school (outside of Chicago), he signed up for every drafting class offered, taking mechanical drafting, machine drafting, and architectural drafting. After college and with a degree in architecture, he started off at one of the larger firms in the Chicago area. And that was his life. Then one day at work, he met Amanda. They fell in love, married and moved out East in 1999, following his parents who had retired in Waldoboro in 1992. The couple moved without jobs, and landed independently work at one of the largest firms in the country. Seven years later, Brian’s mother died. To be closer to his father, the family moved to Damariscotta. Brian joined one of Portland’s largest firms; Amanda joined a smaller company in Rockport. Then, two years later, Brian’s father passed away. With the loss of his parents, Brian and Amanda re-thought their priorities. Waldoboro and Broad Bay Congregational Church had grown large in their lives. So, they moved to Waldoboro. Roots were important, too. Their family of four moved into Brian’s parents’ home. Lastly, work that could be community-based was vital. They founded Medomak Design in 2019, which offers not only architecture but website and graphic design.
Do good work, be quiet about it, and let the work speak for itself. I got that from my parents. But architecture is a lot more than good work alone.
It’s a triangle of people and their interests, by which I mean, the owner, the architect, and the builder. And like any triangle, it’s a lot of balancing.
Everyone arrives with their own preconceptions. A lot of owners think, “I need an architect to do the plans but then I want them to leave, because the more they’re here, the more expensive it’s going to get.”
The builder might think, “Architects, who have never lifted a hammer in their lives, need to get out of the way. They don’t know how a building goes together; but I do. I’ve been doing it for 30 years.”
And we, Amanda and I, enter the picture with no preconceived ideas. Yes, we know space, color and design work, and how they fit together. And yes, we’ve been doing it for more than 30 years, too. But we come in to listen and to be a facilitator.
Relationships are one part of doing architecture. Other parts are drafting, knowing building codes, knowing how spaces flow together and how light works in rooms. But most of all, it’s listening.
Put another way, it’s a series of problems with one big goal, whether it’s a building, an addition, a renovation, a re-do of a bathroom. And the solution is always out there somewhere.
And when it’s the right one, you know it. You say, “How could it not be that?”
There’s no formula. Often, it’s a combination of not just us, but the owner, or the builder ,or all three of us. And we’ll all have different ideas and be combining all sorts of things. Sometimes it arrives as a surprise. Sometimes we have the feeling that we’re close. But there’s always that moment when we say, “Ah ha.”
Sometimes you do a bunch of options for people, an A and a B and a C, and you don’t use any of them. Instead, you take a piece of B and of C and add in something the client suggests, and bingo. That’s the solution!
Or, the solution is right in front of us, like when someone comes in and says, “We want to do a big addition,” because they want to age in place with a primary bedroom and bathroom downstairs.
And we’ll come in and say, “Wait a minute. What if you took this other part of the house and renovated it – you could get almost everything you need out of that part.”
And they’ll go, “Oh. Yes! And we needed to fix that part of the house anyway. And it will cost less.” It always seems so obvious afterwards.
Now, I know you’re talking to me, but I really am one of two people. The whole thing doesn’t happen without Amanda. Not being in Waldoboro. Not having Medomak Design. She is my wife, my best friend, my business partner, and the mother of our two, almost grown-up sons. It’s a whole package.
In work, we complement each other. We have the same sort of aesthetic. We approach things similarly. With every project we work on, we’re both involved.
But because have a lot of projects going on at the same time, I might be focusing on certain ones while she’s working on others. Even working separately, we both know that the resolution is going to be some combination of the two of us. It won’t be hers 100 percent, it won’t be mine 100 percent. It will be a mix of us, every single time. But sometimes getting there can be bumpy.
Like, I’ll be working on something, and I’ll ask her what she thinks. And she’ll say something like, “Well, I don’t know about that…”
Inside, I’ll go, “Uhgh” inside, because she’s someone I love and trust, and she’s disagreeing with me. But because I’ve already put a lot of work and thought into it, I might push back. I might say, “Well, I still think it should be this way.” Or, worse, “Fine. Whatever.”
Then I’ll go away. And a little bit later, there will be something about what she said that will make me think, “What if I tweek this a little bit?” Or, “Hmmm., maybe there’s another way,” or “Oh! We could do this instead,” and I’ll make the change. It could be a few back-and-forths between us. But there will be a point when we both go, “Yeahhh. How could this be any other way?” And the result is always better than what either she or I came up with on our own.
We all want to be able to find compromise in reaching a common goal. But for Amanda and me, it helps that we have a lot of common ground to start with.
Our home is where the old mill was, at the waterfalls. And I think that embodies our philosophy. The waterfalls are where the fresh water meets the salt water. The river is what runs through Waldoboro.
That’s why we named our business after the river. We are part of it.
There’s a rock in the middle, right before the falls. It doesn’t have an official name. I call it The Beaver Rock because at night you can watch the beavers crossing. That rock is where I go when the world feels too much for me. I’ll sit down and watch whatever is happening on the river. And within a few minutes, I’m whole again.
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