How an Apollo installation became the conceptual seed for eleven research-driven rooms – and how Aisling Designs carried an evolving Boise hospitality project through interior design, procurement, construction coordination and general contracting.
There are projects you design, photograph and move on from.
And then there are projects that completely consume you.
For nearly two years, Assemble Boise was that project for me.
I watched it evolve from the former Franklin House in Boise’s North End into an entirely new hospitality destination. During that time, I wasn’t simply designing rooms. I was researching, drawing, sourcing, purchasing, problem-solving, coordinating trades, making construction decisions in the field, responding to an ever-changing building and continually finding ways to preserve the design story through all of it.
As interior designer and general contractor, I had the unusual experience of carrying this project from an idea on paper into the physical spaces guests now walk through at Assemble Boise.
And the idea that ultimately shaped those spaces started in a wonderfully unexpected place.
It started with Apollo.
Before Assemble Was Assemble
When I first became involved, there weren’t eleven finished rooms named for famous physicists. There wasn’t yet the Assemble Boise people know today.
There was the historic Franklin House, an evolving hospitality concept and an enormous amount of possibility.
In July 2024, BoiseDev documented that early chapter of the Franklin House redevelopment and named Brittney Cobb and me, Shannon Thun, as working with owner Dan Berger on the project.
I love looking back at that article now because it captures Assemble before so many of the decisions that would eventually define it had been made.
At that point, I was still trying to answer the question that begins almost every meaningful design project for me:
What is the story?
A beautiful hotel can be filled with beautiful furniture.
That wasn’t enough for me.
I wanted Assemble to have an identity that belonged specifically to this property – something guests might feel immediately, even if they didn’t understand why.
Then came Apollo.
The Idea That Changed Everything
One of the early ideas for the property was a Timothy Oulton Apollo installation – a full-scale interpretation of the Apollo 11 command module transformed into an inhabitable lounge.
It was such an unusual object that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
And that’s when the connections started forming.
Apollo led me to space.
Space led me to physics.
Physics led me to the people behind the theories.
And suddenly I wasn’t thinking about space anymore.
I was thinking about people.
Their personalities.
Their histories.
Their peculiarities.
Their passions.
The places they lived.
The things they surrounded themselves with.
The things they loved – and sometimes the things they absolutely hated.
That became the conceptual foundation for the guest rooms.
Today, the Assemble Boise room collection includes eleven rooms named for Edison, Faraday, Bohr, Newton, Feynman, Curie, Dirac, Galileo, Oppenheimer, Carruthers and Einstein.
But there was one thing I knew immediately:
I did not want eleven theme rooms.
I Wanted You to Feel the Person Without Seeing a Costume
There is a very fine line between designing from a narrative and designing a theme.
I had no interest in filling an Einstein room with equations or turning Curie’s room into a collection of obvious scientific references.
That would have been easy.
What interested me was something much more subtle.
I wanted someone to walk into a room knowing absolutely nothing about the physicist behind it and simply think:
I love this room.
And then perhaps they notice something.
A color.
A piece of artwork.
A material.
A strange little detail.
Maybe they become curious about why it is there.
And suddenly there is another layer to discover.
So I researched these people far beyond their scientific accomplishments.
I looked into their personal histories, interests and hobbies. I looked at the places they lived and the eras that shaped them. I researched their preferences, habits, cultural surroundings, favorite colors where that information existed – even their aversions.
Those details became my design vocabulary.
A person’s relationship to a place might influence a textile.
A hobby could become the quiet inspiration for a piece of art.
A historical reference could influence a pattern or material.
A color could appear without anyone knowing why it belonged there.
The goal was never:
“Look, this is the Einstein room.”
The goal was:
“This room feels like someone.”
And then I had to figure out how to actually build all of it.
Designing It Was Only the Beginning
This is the part of interior design people rarely see.
A rendering can be beautiful.
A specification can be perfect.
A concept can be incredibly strong.
And then construction begins.
Suddenly the project isn’t happening inside your computer anymore.
It is happening inside an existing building.
And existing buildings have opinions.
You open a wall and discover something you didn’t expect.
A room needs to function differently than originally planned.
A product you built a scheme around becomes unavailable.
A lead time no longer works.
A price changes.
A subcontractor needs an answer.
Something that made perfect sense on paper suddenly doesn’t work in three dimensions.
And you have to make a decision.
Sometimes immediately.
For almost two years, that was my relationship with Assemble.
I moved constantly between the creative and practical sides of the project: space planning, interior architecture, renderings, specifications, finishes, fixtures, furniture, procurement, subcontractor coordination, construction management and field decisions.
As general contractor, I wasn’t handing the drawings to someone else and waiting to see what came back.
I was there while the project became real.
That meant every design decision eventually had to answer to construction.
Could we actually build it?
Could we source it?
Would it arrive?
Would it fit?
Could the trades execute it?
What happens when the existing condition isn’t what we expected?
And perhaps most importantly:
When something has to change, how do we change it without losing the idea that made it special in the first place?
That is where so much of the real design work happened.
It is also why my work through Aisling Designs often extends beyond what people traditionally imagine when they hear “interior designer.” For me, design isn’t finished when a room looks beautiful on a screen. It has to survive the process of becoming a real place.
The Project Kept Changing – The Story Couldn’t
There were moments when Assemble felt like a moving target.
The hospitality program evolved.
Spaces changed.
Construction conditions changed.
Products changed.
Schedules changed.
Budgets changed.
And every change created a ripple effect.
Move one thing and suddenly something else doesn’t work.
Change a material and the color beside it feels wrong.
Lose one product and an entire composition may need to be reconsidered.
That meant I was constantly redesigning – sometimes visibly, sometimes in ways no future guest would ever know happened.
And that’s exactly the point.
Good problem-solving should disappear into the finished space.
A guest shouldn’t walk into Assemble and see all the compromises, substitutions, coordination meetings and construction decisions behind the room.
They should simply experience a space that feels intentional.
Protecting that sense of intention became one of my biggest responsibilities on the project.
The building could change.
The details could change.
The path to get there could change.
But the story couldn’t disappear.
Eventually, the Paper Trail Began Telling Part of the Story Too
When you spend nearly two years inside a project, eventually the journey starts appearing in the public record.
By February 2025, we were deep into construction.
A published Boise building-permit record for Assemble Boise at 1502 W. Franklin Street identifies me as the applicant for interior-demolition permit BLD25-00228.
The permit describes demolition of interior partitions, doors, windows, plumbing and mechanical components, finishes, electrical equipment and other elements while the larger tenant-improvement permit was under review.
I want to be very specific about what that record establishes: the published permit identifies me as the applicant. It does not itself identify me as the interior designer or general contractor.
My work in those roles is documented through my own contracts, drawings, specifications, procurement records, construction documentation and project communications.
What I like about the permit is that it captures something different.
It places me inside the actual municipal and construction process while this project was being physically taken apart and rebuilt.
Soon afterward, the scale of the transformation became even more visible.
The subsequent Assemble Hospitality permit, BLD24-03299 documents the conversion of the former bed-and-breakfast into a hotel, including remodeling of the existing building, a 635-square-foot two-story addition, new and remodeled guest rooms and restrooms, ADA improvements, foundations, walls, roof construction and other work.
The stated project value was $900,000.
I find those records fascinating now because construction documents describe a project in such practical terms.
Walls. Foundations. Plumbing. Mechanical. Demolition.
Meanwhile, inside that same project, I was researching physicists, choosing wallpaper, coordinating subcontractors, solving construction conditions, ordering furniture and obsessing over whether a particular color or piece of art told the right story.
Both realities existed at exactly the same time.
And that intersection is where I think interior design becomes really interesting.
Then the Drawings Became Rooms
There is a strange moment near the end of a long project when you realize the thing you have been carrying around in your head for years doesn’t belong only to you anymore.
People are going to walk into it.
Sleep in it.
Meet in it.
Photograph it.
Experience it without knowing anything about the hundreds of decisions that brought it there.
By early 2026, Assemble was finally approaching that moment.
BoiseDev returned to the project as Assemble prepared to open, this time describing an 11-bedroom retreat facility with meeting rooms and outdoor amenities.
The project I had known through drawings, specifications, purchase orders, job-site conversations and endless decisions had become a destination.
Today, the official Assemble Boise website presents the finished property as a North End Boise destination for executive offsites, retreats and gatherings.
Its place within Boise’s hospitality community is also reflected through Visit Boise’s listing for Assemble.
And I get to look at those finished rooms knowing where every one of them started.
Not with furniture.
Not with wallpaper.
Not even with a floor plan.
With a story.
What You Don’t See in the Finished Photographs
Assemble is one of the most meaningful projects in my portfolio, but not simply because I love how the rooms turned out.
I’m proud of what you don’t see.
You don’t see the redraws.
You don’t see the product that never arrived.
You don’t see the idea that had to be abandoned because the building wouldn’t allow it.
You don’t see the phone calls, site meetings, substitutions, purchase orders or the moment a subcontractor needed an answer while I was still mentally working through three possible solutions.
You don’t see how many times a room changed before it became the room in the photograph.
You don’t see the research behind a seemingly insignificant detail.
You don’t see the decisions I made as the designer fighting to protect the concept while the general contractor side of me had to solve the reality of actually building it.
But I see all of it.
And that’s probably why Assemble means so much to me.
It required nearly every part of what I do: narrative concept development, research, space planning, visualization, specifications, sourcing, procurement, adaptive reuse, construction coordination, project management and general contracting.
It reinforced something I have believed throughout my career:
Interiors are built, not decorated.
Decoration is part of what you see at the end.
Design is everything that had to happen to make that ending possible.
That philosophy is central to the interior design, renovation and project services I offer through Aisling Designs. I want to be involved in the thinking behind a space – and, when the project calls for it, in the complicated process of bringing that thinking into the physical world.
Two Years, Seen From the Other Side
Looking back now, there is a remarkable public timeline of a project that once existed mostly in conversations, drawings and my imagination.
In July 2024, BoiseDev documented the proposed Franklin House redevelopment while we were still shaping what it could become.
By February 2025, a Boise building-permit publication identified me as the applicant for the project’s interior-demolition permit during active construction.
In March 2025, the larger Assemble Hospitality permit documented the $900,000 conversion, remodel and addition.
By February 2026, BoiseDev was writing about Assemble again – only now the idea had become an 11-bedroom hospitality destination preparing to welcome guests.
And today, Assemble Boise is no longer something I’m trying to imagine.
It exists.
Those independent sources tell pieces of the story.
My drawings, specifications, contracts, invoices, procurement records, construction documentation and photographs tell other pieces.
But none of them individually can quite capture what it felt like to spend nearly two years bringing it to life.
The Kind of Work I Want to Keep Doing
Assemble represents the kind of work I want Aisling Designs to be known for.
Projects with a point of view.
Projects where research matters.
Projects where the concept runs deeper than selecting beautiful things.
Projects where old buildings present complicated problems that require creative answers.
And projects where design thinking doesn’t end when construction begins.
Aisling Designs is a Boise interior design studio working across residential, commercial and hospitality interiors, with experience spanning interior design, renovation, project management and general contracting.
I’m also proud that Aisling Designs is included in the Architectural Digest AD PRO Directory, and additional project imagery, professional history and client reviews can be found through my Aisling Designs Houzz profile.
But Assemble will always occupy its own place in my work.
It began with a historic Boise property whose future was still evolving.
Then came an Apollo capsule.
Apollo became space.
Space became physics.
Physics became people.
People became stories.
And somehow those stories became eleven rooms.
That is the part of interior design I love most: taking something that exists only as an idea and doing all of the complicated, imperfect, creative work required to make it real.
If you are considering a hospitality, commercial, adaptive-reuse or residential project and want a designer who is as interested in how a space gets built as how it looks when it’s finished, you can explore Aisling Designs’ interior design and renovation services or contact me about your project.
