By River Brook Design & Construction
Leigh and Kevin Misso run Birmingham, Alabama’s River Brook as one shop: architecture, interiors and construction under a single roof from the first sketch onward. That’s not a new pitch in the design world, but their first book, Living with Legacy, makes the case. Fifteen houses in, spanning new construction and historic reimaginings, the monocular perspective holds up.
The writing leans on faith. The firm’s founding is tied to John 7:38, and the introduction returns more than once to the idea of houses as vessels for something larger than shelter. Whether that framing resonates will depend on the reader, but I respect it. These aren’t stage sets; they’re rooms built with the conviction that someone will actually live a life inside them.
What I found more interesting than the mission language was watching that single-team claim actually show up on the page. Integration gets promised often in monographs and then forgotten by chapter two. Here the spaces read as unified rather than assembled, structure and interiors clearly conceived together rather than one handed off to other aesthetic hands.
The fifteen projects vary more than the introduction lets on. Some are ground-up builds; others are careful reworkings of houses that have already been through a decade or two. What holds the book together is discipline: nothing gets added unless it earns its place.
What stays with me is the idea that these houses were built as sanctuaries. That’s rarer than it should be right now.
River Brook: Living With Legacy
From Beta-Plus Publishing. Available for preorder from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Indie Bound.