Places built on connection, made by hand in San Francisco.

Fabrication, public art,
and spatial design

Six carved tree sculptures rising from a circular green bench, canopies ringed in light, in the Vacaville library children's area
Vacaville Library & Cultural Center, 2025
Sara Corbett and Aaron Haldiman, co-founders of CreatingAS1

Who we are

We are creating, as one.

CreatingAS1 is a San Francisco based design, art, fabrication, and social cultivation firm, co-founded by Sara Corbett and Aaron Haldiman. We work in public art, civic placemaking, interior design, and community building, and we believe the process matters as much as the product. Every project is a chance to build the kind of relationship that outlasts the build itself.

We believe humanity is capable of cultivating vibrant ecosystems, places built on mutual abundance and strengthened by interdependence rather than uniformity. To get there, people need to feel a future before they can build it. So we design work that touches people emotionally and opens their imagination, work that makes a better future feel present and possible right now. Our name says the rest. We are creating as one, together with everyone who builds alongside us, and that process shapes us just as much as it shapes what we make.

What we do

Capabilities

Glowing blue organic ceiling panels and carved wooden arches around a glass chandelier

Immersive design

Where story becomes structure.

We design environments that don't just house an experience, they build a world around it. Our intention is always the same: resonate with the client's vision closely enough that the space feels inevitable, and blur the line between the world a visitor left behind and the one they're stepping into. Done right, that threshold moment, where "outside" ends and the experience begins, should be nearly impossible to point to.

200 Channels 2024

SoMa, San Francisco

200 Channels began as a former porn theater, a space defined by isolation and disconnection. We rebuilt it into the opposite: a space for community, connection, and expression. The design draws on natural patterns and flows, the same rhythms and structures found throughout the living world, to reflect a principle we call interbeing, the understanding that nothing exists separately from everything else. Walking through the space isn't just an aesthetic experience. It's an invitation to experience a regenerative present, where connection replaces isolation and the room itself reminds you that you were never really separate from anything around you.

Studio set with a pale geometric triangle wall between angled wood panels

Set design & production

Built for the shot.

Every set has two audiences: the people standing in it and the camera watching it. We design for both. Every choice is shaped by what the production needs, and by the reality of light and lens, understanding what a camera actually catches and what it lets fall away. We build, seam, and assemble with that shot already in mind, so what looks intentional in person reads just as clean on screen.

Snowflake 2026

Menlo Park, California

The client needed a wall that could change on demand, with individual pieces removed, rotated, and placed in new positions between shots. We built a modular geometric system that stays simple and repeatable while still giving every configuration its own character, so variation comes from rearranging a few elegant parts rather than building something new each time. Behind the wall, a diffused, programmable LED system lets backlighting and placement shift with just as little effort as the panels themselves. The result is a set that never repeats itself on camera, built from a kit that never had to grow more complicated to get there.

Folding divider wall with a jewel-toned lattice of painted reclaimed wood

Interior design

Every space, a portal.

We treat a space as a portal, rather than a backdrop. We believe it should surround you with the intentions you already hold, so walking in feels less like entering a room and more like arriving somewhere that was waiting for you. Color, texture, material, and narrative move together toward that vision. Form and function are married throughout, every piece purposeful and every piece elegant.

Professor Seagull's Smartshop 2026

North Beach, San Francisco

Professor Seagull's Smartshop is a North Beach apothecary, gallery, and community hub, and the site of our first solo art show. When the Smartshop team launched the Church of Mother Gong next door, they asked us to help the space hold both worlds. We built a five panel divider wall that folds accordion style between two rooms. One side stays white and quiet, so the gallery's artwork can speak on its own. The other faces the altar. Between them, laser cut reclaimed fence boards form a lattice of jewel tones, a psychedelic fractal built from the Mother Gong logo, with a single eye at its center. The wall doesn't just separate two rooms. It reminds anyone who walks through it that everything senses, and everything is in relation.

Civic placemaking

A place people return to.

Public work carries a different kind of weight. We design for people to feel like they belong somewhere, and like they're part of something larger than themselves. That kind of interconnection only holds if the work does, so everything we build for a civic context is meant to withstand the test of time, not just the moment it opens. Civic placemaking, at its core, is the synthesis of material, narrative, and experience into something a community can return to for years.

Vacaville Library & Cultural Center 2025

Vacaville, California

When Vacaville's library renovation called for removing a beloved tree sculpture from the children's section, we didn't replace it with another single tree. We looked to old growth redwood forests, where a family circle of saplings grows from an elder tree's roots, interwoven and mutually supporting long after it falls. Six tree sculptures now form a multi level circular seating area, carved from over 1,200 stacked layers of laminated plywood whose edges read like the pages of a book. Children climb through the roots at ground level, while a central oculus marks the space the old tree left behind, its canopy ringed in light and watched over by a carved hawk. The whole piece was built through community.

Wall-mounted relief map of Solano County in layered wood and metal

Public art

Built to belong.

We believe people protect what they identify with, and cherish what they feel connected to. Public art shouldn't just be something people look at. It should be something they interact with, something that makes them feel like they belong to a place. That kind of work only happens with real coordination: agencies, organizations, and individual stakeholders all have a stake in a public project, and we know how to work with all of them to get it built. We also know how to build it to last, using materials and methods suited for public life over decades.

Solano Transportation Authority 2022

Solano County, California

For the Solano Transportation Authority's new headquarters, we built a nine by eleven foot custom fabricated map of the county, installed in the lobby facing the boardroom where mayors and elected officials meet each month. We started from a simple belief. People protect what they identify with. Solano County has preserved over eighty percent of its land as agriculture, open space, and wildlife habitat since 1984, and we wanted the map to carry that same pride in its materials, not just its geography. Mirrored steel traces the highways. Copper acrylic marks the transit lines. Patinated steel follows the railroads, stacked plywood builds the topography, and stained aluminum becomes water. Migratory birds and wind turbines move through all of it.

Capability, compounded

Skills & Processes

Our internal skills run deep and wide, spanning fabrication, technology, design, and craft, and we're always adding to them. We invent new processes as often as projects demand it, building the method alongside the piece when nothing off the shelf will do. And we don't stop at our own walls. We work inside a growing community of makers, technologists, and craftspeople we've built relationships with over years, so the skills available to any project are never just the ones already in the shop. Put together, there's very little we can't figure out how to build.

  • Fine Woodwork & Carpentry
  • Metal Fabrication & Welding
  • CNC Machining
  • Laser Cutting
  • High-End Finishing
  • Tech Integration & Interactivity
  • LED Lighting
  • Project Management
  • Consulting & Dream Coaching
  • Concept Development & Ideation
  • Upholstery & Textiles
  • Structural Engineering & Rigging

Let's build something together.

Tell us about the space, the community, or the idea. We'll figure out how to build it.