Story

Over a decade ago, I had my first daughter on my own. I decided to build a guest suite attached to my home so my mother could move in and help me raise my child. We made many magical memories, three generations deep. Recently my mother got sick and needed full-time care. Thankfully we found a wonderful assisted living home for her just a couple miles from us.

In early 2025, the sudden reductions in federal funding and massive government layoffs hit so many families hard. I was one of them, as my small business suffered. Needing an immediate solution, I decided to redesign my mother’s suite into an Airbnb in order to quickly generate additional income for my family. Suite44 operates today as a guest favorite airbnb and a site super-host.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that — in addition to Suite44 providing financial relief — brief interactions with guests turned into meaningful connections. The simple gesture of offering space to a traveler, grandparents visiting grandkids, or parents doing college tours with kids, offered a me subtle yet impactful human exchange that seems to matter to me, and to them.

This sparked my curiosity, asking what if I helped others do this? The question for me became: How might we use the spaces we occupy, in order to create more stability and connection, so that we reignite human interdependency, and the joy it brings us? Out of this 44Spaces was born.