Lauren Himmelvo works with a creative team at Country & Seaweed in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California designing and building one-of-a-kind projects. Lauren believes in craft, timelessness, and most importantly, leaving things better than when she found them.

She started building her body of work from about the time she could walk. Lauren’s love of all things built runs in her blood, having grown up with accomplished parents in the worlds of interior design, hospitality, restaurants, and real estate development. As a kid, her family inhabited numerous home renovation projects, and she fell in love with the process, the smells, the chaos. Raised in a small New England coastal town, her mariner roots have become the defining arc of her life and work. Building, reviving the old, and bringing a handcrafted quality to every project are all elements she strives to do.

In 2012, on a drive through central Texas to purchase a 1968 Flying Cloud Airstream for a restaurant project, Lauren discovered the Texas hill country, and it was pure kismet. In the landscape, she saw everything she strives to incorporate into her work - rustic modern simplicity meets the Far East and the warmth of California wine country. Whether it was building a tiny cabin outside of Austin or renovating a modern San Francisco Bay Area dwelling -- simplicity, humility, family living, with a dash of laid back California lifestyle thrown in…these traits have become her signature.

For 10+ years Lauren worked in the design build world in Austin, managing numerous projects. Her journey eventually moved farther west to the stark beauty of the Chihuahuan Desert to the town of Marfa, Texas. Now a part-time resident, Lauren is planning a major renovation on her Ma Modular prefab home that has been featured in Dwell Magazine and the Phaidon coffee table book “Marfa Modern: Artistic Interiors of the West Texas High Desert.”

In 2020, with the global pandemic came a seismic shift where folks started to rethink the way they live and how one inhabits home. As the madness started to fade, Lauren decided it was time for her own seismic change, relocating with her family to Paris, France for two years, making pilgrimages to the baths of Vals Switzerland and the riads of Marrakesh. It was a prolific time of creativity for Lauren who attended a post graduate architecture program for one semester, diving deeply into the culture of Japanese bathhouses, a lifelong passion.

Lauren continues to study design and architecture at institutions around the world every chance she gets, honing her skills, learning natural plaster techniques or Japanese joinery. She holds a masters degree in Film from Boston University and has produced and directed numerous award-winning films, including the television pilot Fault Line which recently won “Best Short” at the 2025 Carmel International Film Festival. She also holds a United States Coast Guard Launch Tender License and is an avid recreational lobsterwoman in the summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts.