We're Remiand Kendra.We met in high school.
Both of us were looking for something more stable than what we knew.
The beginning
We met in high school, freshman year, both of us looking for something more stable than what we had.
Kendra grew up in a tight-knit family without her dad close by, raised by her mom and a village of people around her.
Remi grew up in a home that looked great from outside. From the inside, the marriage at the center of it and the version of parenting in it weren't quite the same picture people saw from the street.
We knew the kind of home we wanted to build. We didn't yet know how to build one.
We got married in 2015 in Redwood City, surrounded by a community that gave us more onboarding into marriage than most people get. Even with that, there was a lot we didn't know.
Jaiye came first. Kemi two years later. Sadé six years after that. Three kids in just under a decade. The love was clear from day one. What wasn't clear was that loving each other and being intentional were not the same thing as having a system that could hold a family of five. The rhythms we'd inherited and patched together couldn't carry the weight as it grew.
We weren't failing at family. We were running family on a pile of inherited habits and good intentions and hoping it would hold.
We weren't failing at family. We were running family on a pile of inherited habits and good intentions and hoping it would hold. It mostly didn't.
The kids
Jaiye is our oldest. Highly intellectual. Academic things come easy. Logic. He's serious, intense, competitive. The kid who reads the rules and then tells you when you broke them.
Kemi is our middle. Artist through and through. Singer, dancer, actor, creator. A character. The exact opposite of her brother, which is its own kind of magic to watch.
Sadé is our youngest, one year old. Sweet, calm, the grounding presence in the house. She's everybody's baby, including her brother's and sister's.
What we saw
Then we looked up.
We had close friends. Different kinds of houses than ours. Same chaos. Same fading. Same one parent carrying the version of the family that lived only in her head.
We started asking around. The pattern held everywhere we looked.
Family is the original institution of the world. The most important institution. And nobody is being onboarded into it. There's no training. No mentorship. No performance review. You don't have a boss for the job that matters most.
You build a business and there are systems for everything. Hiring rituals. Quarterly reviews. KPIs. Slack channels. A board to keep you honest. You build a household and the most important work most of us will ever do gets the leftover hours and whatever habits we happened to inherit.
That's not a Remi-and-Kendra problem. That's the problem.
What we built
So we sat down and built it.
We started writing things down. Not the version we wanted our house to look like. The version it actually was. Every domain. Every responsibility. Every invisible thing one of us was carrying that the other didn't even know about.
We made it a weekly meeting. Sunday nights at the kitchen table.
That notebook became a framework. The framework became twelve pillars. The pillars became this site, and they became the software we built so other families could run the same system at home.
The House We Built is the philosophy and the writing. Trellis is the tool. One without the other works fine. Both together is what we're aiming at.
Stanford taught me how to study families. Motherhood taught me what the research couldn't.
I went there because I wanted to understand how families learn together. The closer I got to the work, the more I realized how much of what makes a family actually flourish never makes it into a paper. It lives at the table. It lives in the rhythms nobody publishes. So when I became a mother, I started studying my own house with the same seriousness I'd studied other people's.
We homeschool our kids. That has taught me more about family than my PhD did. Homeschooling, when you actually do it, is family all day. You don't get to clock out. You don't get to assume the school will fill in the gaps. You have to know what you're doing, why, and what kind of people you're trying to raise.
My job here is to make sure everything we publish is honest about what we actually know and honest about what we are still figuring out. I won't let us sell anyone a version of this work I wouldn't trust my own children to.
I'm the youngest of four brothers. My three older brothers became some of the most intentional home builders I know. They watched what worked in our childhood and what didn't, and they built differently. They've shared the wins with me, and they've shared the failures. That's most of what I know about building a family. Being the youngest means you get to watch.
I ran a youth nonprofit called Ambition Angels for eight years. We work with teenagers who have what most teenagers in this country have: talent, hunger, and a system that doesn't see them. The job is putting them in the rooms and around the people who change a life. I started it because somebody did that for me.
I've built a couple of early-stage companies. Trellis is the one that finally felt like the right shape for the thing I cared most about. The most important work most of us will ever do is the home. Almost nobody is building serious infrastructure for that. We are.
My faith is the underneath of all of it. I believe God built us to live in family. I think that's why no family system can really run on a single person's head. We were designed to share the load. That's not a Sunday sermon. It's the reason any of this works on a Tuesday.
Where we are now
People assume the season we're in is the hard one. Three kids under ten. Two careers. Homeschool. A company in year two. They expect us to be drained.
We were. We're not, anymore. The marriage is solid. The home is calm. The kids are loud, and we know each one. Home is honestly the best part of my life. Most people I know can't say that.
That's not luck. It's a system.
The village
My dad came from Nigeria. Where he grew up, "it takes a village" is not a phrase people say. It's how houses get run. Children get raised by everybody who shows up at the door. The work of family is shared, not carried.
We didn't build this house alone, and we didn't want to. Our marriage exists because of the people who got us here. We were not meant to do this on our own. Nobody is.
This site is one way we're trying to be part of your village too. The essays are for you. The podcast will be for you. Trellis is the tool if you want it.
If you build with us, you're not building alone. That's the whole point.