For Luis Fernandez, it all started with a sixth grade homework assignment to draw a floor plan. He took the task seriously, buying real estate magazines in order to request marketing materials for the multimillion-dollar listings found inside; in turn, he received a treasure trove of floor plans and photos—and plenty of fodder for his budding interest in design.

“These real estate agents probably thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, this buyer from Miami is interested in all these properties worldwide,’” he tells host Kaitlin Petersen on the latest episode of the Trade Tales podcast. “I would sit there and study the floor plans with the pictures and try to correlate those two. … It [awakened] in me this idea that you could depict spaces in this two-dimensional floor plan.”

Fernandez went on to study

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