Some of Paul's earliest sense of design came from summers spent in the English countryside — the Malvern Hills and the Cotswolds, visiting family and returning every year since. Cottages built to last. Villages where the journey between homes was as beautiful as the homes themselves. Gardens full of birdsong, flowers, and people on foot. Compared to the American landscape of highways and strip malls, this was a different way of understanding what a home and a place could be — and what they could do for the people who lived there. That contrast planted something that would eventually surface as a design practice.

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But that came later. First there was training as a scientist — biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech, followed by a nanotechnology fellowship at Harvard. The fellowship was the turning point. Days spent in a windowless clean room, in a full body suit, running the same experiments over and over. Paul realized what he actually wanted — outdoors, human contact, creative work, something tangible and personal. He left the lab.

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What followed was several years of travel across multiple trips — the 10,000-mile bicycle ride from Atlanta to Buenos Aires, motorcycle circuits of India, Southeast Asia, and New Zealand, and extended time living throughout South America and Europe. Two cities stayed with him. Tokyo was civilization at its most precise — everything running with intention, people flowing through spaces like fish in an aquarium, an aesthetic that made minimalism feel warm rather than cold. Buenos Aires was the other pole — a city preserved in early-twentieth-century grandeur, wide boulevards under ancient sycamores, Mediterranean color woven through everything. Different architectures, different centuries, but the same underlying idea: places that raise the everyday experience of being alive in them.

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Back in New York, Paul rented a small apartment in Chelsea and started tinkering — building his own furniture, painting art for the walls, planting the space, experimenting with lighting. Design as personal experiment. It quickly became clear how much the space around him was affecting his wellbeing, who he was, and how he spent each day. Around the same period, he completed a master's in journalism at Columbia University — training that sharpened his ability to interview, listen, and draw out what people actually mean beneath what they say.

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After Columbia, Paul spent five years designing and staging luxury residential properties in New York — sharpening his eye, learning how buyers actually respond to space, and building the practice that would become Studio Kestrel. He founded the studio in 2019 to work directly with private clients, on their terms and inside their lives.

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Studio Kestrel does not have a signature look. Every home the studio designs is built around who actually lives there — how the family gathers, what they love, how they want the day to move through the rooms. Paul's role is to translate that into an interior that feels tasteful, chic, warm, and unmistakably theirs. The design methodology draws on organic modern principles, feng shui as spatial logic, and the years of studying how different cultures build for daily life. But every project begins with the client. The finished home reflects the people who live there.

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Since beginning his career in design, Paul has designed residences at 432 Park Avenue, the Woolworth Building, 1 West End Avenue, the Four Seasons Downtown, 50 West 66th Street, and 57 Ocean in Miami Beach, along with homes across the Hamptons and Southern California.