Hi — I'm Andrew Nutt, and I'm a fourth-generation home builder. My first construction project was at age five, on a jobsite with my dad. I grew up building houses from the ground up, doing every trade. I spent years framing homes in Alaska and building with a non-profit in Papua New Guinea. In 2015 I started Flourish Design and Build in the Pacific Northwest and things took off. I quickly realized that real estate was the key to building long-term wealth.
Somewhere in there I got obsessed with a question I couldn't shake: how do the spaces we live in affect our mental health? I went back to school to answer it. I hold a master's in relational psychoanalysis and a second master's in philosophy (relational ontology). Most of my research focused on attachment theory — Bowlby's secure base, Winnicott's holding environment — the idea that a well-built home can have the same kind of psychological effect on an adult body that a steady caregiver has on a child. I wanted to find ways the built environment could help people flourish.
Meanwhile, on the real estate side of things, I realized that short-term rentals were the key to outsized financial returns. I tried a big-name STR management firm on one of my own properties, watched it under-deliver and fail to care for my guests, took it over myself, and tripled the revenue. Then friends started asking me to do the same for them. That's how the company got built. We perfected dynamic, data-driven pricing, built in-house maintenance, trained a dedicated cleaning team, and assembled a whole host of boots-on-the-ground folks ready to help.
I've done residential development, STRs, BRRRR flips, long-term rentals, multifamily, commercial, billboards — you name it, I've done it or underwritten it.
When I'm not building Airbnbs of my own, I'm helping others build theirs. At Stay Flourish, we don't distinguish between the homes I own and the ones our partners own. Everyone is treated like they own the company.
Past all of that, every home we’ve built has taught the same lesson.
beauty and remain
the same.
A beautiful home is a carefully made environment, and it changes how you feel. It doesn't take a mansion. Ordinary life doesn't offer many things that can meet a person at the level of the soul, and a well-made home is one of them. You come back into the world a little different: calmer, steadier, more yourself, with more capacity to love the people around you.
So the question I'll leave you with is the one I ask myself every day:
beautiful life?
If the answer is no, or even partially no — maybe I can help make that a yes.
