When Nadia Palacios Lauterbach was a little girl, her father, a history professor told her bedtime stories about Julius Caesar and the Gallic wars.
“In all of the stories, the connective thread was the structures. If he was talking about Greek democracy, I had to see the Parthenon,” said Nadia, 44 and a native of Nicaragua. “I had this idea that human life was played with a background of civilization, buildings and structures, and I was fascinated by it.”
She is the May honoree in the Houston Design District’s Leaders In Design program.
While studying architecture at the University of Notre Dame, Nadia met her husband, John Lauterbach, now an engineer at NASA. After internships in Washington D.C., and Chicago, Nadia went to work for Curtis & Windham Architects in Houston.
Since 2009, she’s helped interior designers, architects and builders finish great homes through her Nadia Palacios Architecture + Interiors + Landscape, a firm known for highly detailed designs in stone and millwork.
“What I enjoy about architecture the most is that life develops against a background of architecture,” Nadia said. “We are creating the theater for future memories.”