About

I’m Markus Lehto. I’m a systems thinker: I connect what usually stays apart, industries, cultures, disciplines and the people inside them.

I’m a Finnish Canadian who has lived for 27 years in Turkey, where East meets West, and I’ve worked in more than 15 countries across finance, real estate, design and community building. I’ve taken landmark developments from first idea to opening, shaped projects worth well over 5 billion dollars alongside global leaders in architecture and investment, and built communities that have brought thousands of people together. I work at every scale, from city masterplans to self-managing communities.

I’ve also been a musician for more than forty years. I play several instruments, record at home and release my music on my own label. This year I trained as a yoga teacher in Rishikesh.

At 53, part of me still doesn’t know what I’m going to do when I grow up. Through all of it runs one question: what kind of world do we want to live in?

HearthVS is where all of that now comes together. VS is for venture studio, though for now it’s a personal experiment more than a company: a new way of working that puts warmth first and uses the tools around us to make what wasn’t possible before.

Look inside the word hearth and you’ll find its brief: hear, heart, earth, art, heat. Listening, care, the living world, beauty and the warmth that brings people together. A venture belongs here if it serves them, and if it sends you back to your life when you turn it off.

Something has changed in how things get made. A person who knows what should exist can now build it, side by side with an intelligent machine.

Buildings taught me what any large system teaches. A project starts with a feeling and a reason, and then it passes down a long line, from investor to architect to project team to leasing agent to the public. Like the children’s game of whispers, what arrives at the end is rarely what was said at the start. Envisioning, the process I developed for it, was my way of holding the message whole, so that a place stayed more than a pile of steel, concrete and glass.

Making anything digital has had the same long line, with a team at every layer. Those layers can now be held in one place, with a person and a machine working as a single instrument, and the whisper can end. The person brings the vision, the ear and the judgement of what’s right. The machine brings speed, memory and a great many drafts. What comes out of that synthesis is new.

CommonUnity, Arcanakin and the other things in the workshop are what that looks like so far. Each is also a test of how much of what’s human can travel through a screen.