30X40 Design Workshop

→ September 18, 2026

Hey there,

Many of us travel to recharge our creative batteries, it's certainly true for me and I’ve just returned from two weeks exploring the west coast of Ireland.

These are a few things I’ve been reading, making, using, researching, eating, drinking, and paying attention to lately. Some are from the trip, others are simply where curiosity has taken me.

Hopefully something here inspires your own creative practice!

---

I VISITED: The Bothy at Fernwood​

A thoughtful collection of small structures you can rent designedd by MarMar Architects knit into the seaside landscape just outside Clifden, Ireland.

Inside the Bothy I found a small, self-published book documenting the design and construction of their nearby Stilt House (you can rent that one too). I love the idea of a building having its own physical record and it has me thinking about my own portfolio in these terms, rather than just another digital photo gallery on a website.

---

I’M RESEARCHING: Hardware for small spaces

The Bothy organizes its small living space around a service core containing the bathroom, kitchen, and storage on one flank of the structure. Doors open, work surfaces slide out, and the dining table folds away when it’s not needed.

These clever design solutions sent me looking for all the folding brackets, concealed hardware, and the small mechanisms that made the compact space serve many functions.

---

I LEARNED: Clints + grykes

Precise, weird words, I love they exist. I took a day trip out to the island of Inis Mór, rented a bike, and explored Dún Aonghasa (3,000 years old!) and Dún Dúchathair (the Black Fort), two ancient stone forts on an almost treeless karst landscape.

It's impossible not to notice the fractured landform there and it turns out they have geologic terms for them: the flat blocks are called clints, and they're separated by deep fissures called grykes. For generations, islanders have cleared the stone to make fields for crops and shelter livestock from the wind. They form the seemingly endless patchwork of (surprisingly tall!) walls you see everywhere. The unusual way the walls are constructed comes from the shape of the clints.

---

I READ: Single Model 02: S-65 City Tractor

Professional scale modeler (why didn't I know this was a thing when I was 18?), Mike Rinaldi, takes a humble tractor model from beginning to end, focusing on process, finishing, weathering, describing all the tiny decisions along the way.

The subject is model making (which I'm a sucker for), but there’s plenty here for anyone obsessed with craft + process. And, damn, the book itself is nicely designed.

---

I WATCHED: Secret Mall Apartment

In 2003, eight artists discovered a 750-square-foot leftover space hidden inside Providence Place Mall and secretly turned it into an apartment. They smuggled in furniture and more than two tons of cinder block, tapped into the mall’s electricity, and went undetected for four years.

The film uses their original footage to tell the story and it's a compelling premise: turn an unused space into art, activism, and architecture.

---

I ATE: Oysters

Kelly Gigas oysters with blackberry mignonette at Kai in Galway. The wabi-sabi interior is something I could never design myself, but I appreciated the warm, imperfect, unpretentious space... felt like eating in a friend’s kitchen.

---

I DRANK: An Dúlamán

I didn’t know Irish maritime gin was even a thing... An Dúlamán is distilled in Donegal with five kinds of locally sourced seaweed. The pepper dulse can only be gathered at the lowest tides around a full moon.

So much thought invested... the naming, the bottle shape (there's a special meaning), hand-lettered labels, commissioned bottle artwork, even the new distillery in Ardara was designed around their process by local architects.

Also drank: a lot of Guinness.

---

I’M MAKING: Papercuts (again)

I used to sell paper cuttings on Etsy in the early days of 30X40, now it's just a hobby. This one brought me back to my early architecture school days (maybe I never graduated?) White on white, experimenting with positive + negative space, trying to figure out how to suggest movement in a static piece (inspired by this trip to Monhegan).

---

I’M USING: ChatGPT Projects

I know, AI... enough already! September 15th just passed and in the US that means quarterly taxes are due and, instead of calculating it long-form (the really old way) or chat-by-chat (the old way), I spent half an hour creating a ChatGPT Project (here's how) with custom instructions, anonymized financials, prior payments, and Q3’s P&L. Going forward, it will only take a few minutes to confirm state/federal taxes due and - even better - I can query any planning moves I might want to make in Q4.

That’s one use-case, but you can apply this to any aspect of your work by creating one for each project you’re working on. Include: specs, code + zoning research, products, budget trackers. A "Project" lets you deliberately constrain and curate the working context. I have a step-by-step to show you how to do it in this blog post.​

Quick Tutorial Here

Cheers to a great weekend...
​

Eric @30X40

Resources

Better Context

Outline Spec + Schedules A good ChatGPT Project (see above) starts with good source material. My Residential Outline Spec + Schedule templates gives you a working framework for organizing the products, materials, fixtures, finishes, and decisions that become part of your project context. Use it as the starting point for the living document I talk about in the blog post linked above. ​ ​Download here.​

Download Here →