I wish I could say architecture was always the path I wanted to go down. That the story was clean, clear, and to the point. Instead of a graceful climb into my career it was more of a fall, where I woke up one day at 22 leading a team of 20+ people in renovating a house… and having no idea what I was doing.

As somebody who relentlessly planned my every step since I was a small child, in retrospect it seems comical that what I landed on was something that was never on my list of goals but was actually there all along.

When my grandparents came to America and started to make some money working in the food distribution business, they immediately put all of it into buying property around LA. They would renovate the houses themselves and put my mom and aunt on paint duty; every weekend, this was their super fun leisurely activity. My parents were both fashion designers and ran their own companies, so my main weekend and after school activity was climbing around on rolls of fabric in factories (I got it easy compared to my mom). My mom eventually went into selling commercial real estate and around that time I decided that I didn’t want to do anything my family did; I wanted to be an actress.

I started performing in plays all around Long Beach and when I was 10, forced my mom to send my pictures in to modeling agencies. I landed a contract with Ford Models the next week. My acting opened my world up to playwriting, and at 16 I had my play produced at the Theater of Note in LA. I went to UCLA, interned at film production studios, kept acting and booked several national commercials. When I graduated I decided to pursue acting full time — but we know how the story ends so that obviously didn’t happen.

I was living in a house in LA where the floor was essentially caving in, and when my mom came to visit me she yelled at me and told me to spend some of the money I made acting to buy a condo for myself. Instead, I found the best deal that probably ever happened in LA and bought a house in Silver Lake. We had an architect based in San Diego and a General Contractor that disappeared within the first week of the project, so I found myself running the construction and having to bring the plans to the city and explain corrections and revisions that the architect made. In that first project, I added over a million dollars in value to the property.

From there, my mom and I decided to team up together and we grew her real estate company The Avi Ross Group to include design and construction. We’ve worked on projects all throughout Southern California, doing everything on the project from initial investment, project management and general contracting, architectural design, interior design, landscaping, and staging and decor… with some very strict fully self-funded budgets.

In 2020 I decided that while I had 4 years of experience working on projects, I wanted to learn more. I started a program at Santa Monica College in Architecture while continuing to work on projects, and here we are today. I’m seeking to get my Masters in Architecture to keep the story going, to continue to learn, because I think I’ve really only just finished the Introduction.