Meet Xanthe,
founder of Suund
I'm a Part II RIBA qualified architectural designer, specialising in small spaces designed around wellbeing.
I graduated in architecture in 2013, and not long after, I found myself on the other side of the world. I spent nearly a decade volunteering and then working as a project manager for an international disaster relief NGO. The work took me across Asia and the Americas rebuilding homes and community spaces in the aftermath of earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes.
I watched up close how profoundly the quality of a space shapes people's lives and their sense of safety, dignity, and recovery. It gave me a conviction I've never lost: that design is only worth doing if it genuinely improves how people feel in a place.
Eventually, a combination of the pandemic and something deeper, a need to feel rooted, to be home, brought me back to Scotland. I returned to architecture with that humanitarian lens intact and went on to work at Glampitect, one of the UK's leading glamping development consultancies, designing pods and cabins, navigating rural planning, and helping clients bring retreat sites to life from the ground up.
What I kept noticing was a gap. Wellness had become a marketing word, something bolted on at the end of a project rather than designed into its foundations. I started Suund to do it differently: to work with people who want spaces that are restorative, not because they've been labelled that way, but because every decision, from the way light enters a room to the relationship between a building and its landscape, has been made with that intention.
I'm from the Scottish Highlands. I grew up understanding that the landscape holds something special and that being in the right place, in a space that's honest about where it is, does something to you. After years of moving, I came back to put down roots. That's what I try to help other people do too.
Why wellness has to start at the beginning
For me, wellness design isn't a finish. It's not a feature you add at the end, like specifying a wood burner or positioning a hot tub for the Instagram shot.
It starts with how a space is oriented: which way the light falls, what you see when you wake up, how sound moves through a room, and where the threshold between inside and outside sits. It's designed into the bones of a space, not applied to its surface.
Suund is inspired by a Scottish Gaelic word, essentially meaning ‘good spirits’, a sense of aliveness and vitality in a place. Good design doesn't need to shout. It just makes you feel well without quite knowing why.