Margaret McMahon, Wimberly Interiors

Hi, I’m Stacy Shoemaker Rauen, editor in chief of Hospitality Design magazine, with HD’s what I’ve learned podcast. Today, I chatted with Margaret McMahon, managing director and senior vice president of Wimberly Interiors. She started her design career with Trisha Wilson when she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, but she ended up finding what she calls her addiction. After three decades, she left to start up the interior design arm of WATG. Eight years later, Wimberly has multiple offices and a list of great projects, further solidifying her as a heavyweight in the industry, and to hear her tell it, it’s due to being fearless and taking risks.

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, I’m here with Margaret McMahon, senior vice president and managing director of Wimberly Interiors, and a dear friend. Hi, Margaret. Thank you so much for being here.

Margaret McMahon: Hi Stacy.

SSR: The whole idea of this podcast is what I’ve learned, and you’ve had such an amazing career, and we’re such big fans of all you do that we’re so excited for you to share a little bit about your life story. So, let’s start at the beginning. You grew up in New York. Did you know you always wanted to be a designer? Was there anything from your childhood that led you to this amazing career?

MM: Absolutely not. Aside from my mother taking me to Kraus Paint Store in Bayside. I grew up in Douglaston [in Queens, New York], actually with Deborah Berke. We grew up in the same town. My mother would take us to Kraus & Sons on Bell Boulevard in Bayside and we got to pick out the wallcovering for our bedrooms. That’s as far as it ever went.

SSR: So, there’s no school for design?

MM: No. So, I was a public school kid until my parents realized that I had a behavior problem. They sent me to an all girls Catholic school in Manhasset [New York], where I graduated in the ’70s where they thought that the main skill that you needed to have was typing. But I was gonna become a lawyer. That was my goal, and really, I think I said I was gonna become a lawyer because it sounded good. Plus, I love to argue. So, I was gonna be a lawyer.

SSR: I love this story, but I’ll prompt you for this story. So, you fell into design via a temp service called Kelly Services. Can you tell us a little bit about how that happened?

MM: So, when I got out of college, my dad was a doctor and he had four kids in college at the same time, and my brother went to school for oceanography. He went to school for all sorts of things, and he was in a private flight school called Embry-Riddle [in Dayton Beach, Florida] that was super expensive. So, my timing wasn’t great when I went to my dad, I said, ‘I’d like to go to law school.’ And he said, ‘Good for you. Now, as soon as you figure out how to pay for that, you’re off to the races.’ My coping skills were to go windsurfing and smoke pot all summer. My mother, who had been accessories editor of Harper’s Bazaar magazine before she got married—she was a real smart lady—looked at me and realized that I was a kid in crisis, not knowing what I wanted to do. She pulled me aside at the end of the summer and said, ‘Listen, you have to get a job.’ She goes, ‘I know you don’t know what you want to do, but I’m pretty darn sure you don’t wanna be a lawyer.’ She said, ‘I want you to go to Kelly Services in New York and try all sorts of jobs to figure out what it is that you want to do.’ And, really, my mother was my first mentor for sure. I went in to Kelly Services. They asked if I could type and I said, ‘I can type anybody out of a typing pool.’ And they said, ‘Can you cut matboard?” And I said, ‘Yes, I can.’ I had taken art classes in college. That was the extent of my art career. And my first temp job, they said, ‘This is interesting. Someone’s looking for someone who can type and can cut matboard at the same time, and the name of the company is Wilson Associates. They are up on 39 East 67th Street, and we’re going to arrange for you to go have a meeting with them.’ So, Trisha Wilson was my first job. That’s how I got into it.

SSR: What was it like working with Trisha?

MM: I didn’t work with Trisha. I worked with a woman named Liz Morehouse, who was just an amazing woman, super  talented, and it was just her. So, I walked in and I don’t know where I got these skills from, and I know as I get older my OCD gets so revved up now, but I walked into this place and I realized that she was by herself and she needed help. They were doing the bankers’ trust offices in Cairo, Egypt, so I was cutting matboard and helping to put together a presentation. So, that took a couple days, big deal. In the mean time, I was answering phones and typing some stuff, but I started to look around and I said to her, ‘You know, you have this room next door that’s piled with fabric books and stuff, do you want me to help you get organized?’ The way I think that they saw me was someone who was willing to roll up their sleeves and do whatever it took to get a job done. I think that that was really the premise of how I connected. So, it was with Liz Morehouse.

And then the first time Trisha Wilson came to town, I met this woman from Texas that was just amazing, and she had asked me, she said, ‘Listen, would you run down the street and get me Entenmann’s doughnuts?’ I said, ‘Sure, no problem.’ That was my first intro to Trisha, and meeting her, and that’s really a true story because maybe five years ago Sue [Wade-Walters], who you know works for Ritz, we were working on [Ritz-Carlton] Naples with Host [Hotels & Resorts], and she pulled me to the side of the room, I hadn’t seen her in years, and she said, ‘I have to apologize to you.’ And I said, ‘Oh, God, what for?’ She said, ‘I just felt so badly all those years ago when Trisha would ask you to go get her doughnuts.’

I even look at staff in my office now and I wouldn’t dream of asking them things like that. Actually, I would, but I know that there’s a line that you really shouldn’t cross. But I had no problem doing anything that I was asked to do. I think that she just realized that, and it wasn’t the Entenmann’s doughnut test by any stretch, but I think that the fact that I would dig in and do whatever it took resonated with them.

SSR: And it’s not an easy lesson to learn. You either have it or you don’t, right?

MM: Most definitely. I think that is true, and what is interesting, I say to people all the time, and I say this all the time only because it’s so true, Trisha Wilson saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. And you know, a lot of times to peel back the layers, and a lot of it is exposure, you know? I grew up in a great neighborhood, but I didn’t grow up where families were hiring interior designers to come in and redo their houses. That wasn’t how I grew up. Now, maybe there were other families in Douglaston who did it, but my father was sort of a family doctor who took care of people for a very minimal amount of money, and it was raising four kids, and my mother took an upholstery class. She was learning how to do upholstery. I still have that chair in my house. But I didn’t have that exposure, and I always say to my teams is in this day and age when we’re all walking down the street looking at our phones, you have to look up. You have to look up and you have to see what’s around you because there’s so many things you could miss. And I was lucky back then that there were so few distractions that I could see those opportunities in front of me that I might have missed.

SSR: What were some of your best memories working at Wilson? Any projects? I mean you were there for what, three decades, almost?

MM: You know, it’s interesting because one of my best friends works for Mastercard, and she had emailed me recently and said, ‘Didn’t you work on the Ronald McDonald House in New York?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. At the time it was the largest Ronald McDonald House in the world, and we had done it with John Tishman, we had been working on the Dolphin and the Swan.’ And she said, ‘You know, they’re having their anniversary, and they want to talk to you about it. They want you to see the house, and where it is now.’ And for a while I had forgotten about that, but truly it’s one of my proudest moments of doing something that really not only impacts families, but kids that are in distress and there’s a whole psychology behind it. And sometimes you have to be reminded of that. It was always stuck in the back of my mind and people would say in interviews, you know we’re interviewing for a project, ‘What’s your favorite hotel? Or, ‘What is your favorite project?’ And sometimes you forget, but that really was one of the most amazing experiences that I’ve ever had.

SSR: Going back to this whole idea of hard work and rolling up your sleeves, there’s one story that I always make you tell that you told me once. You had some clients coming in, but you need to kind of show some good face at Wilson Associates and you brought in some help, some friends and phones.

MM: This is how Trisha started. It’s amazing when you have mentor like that, because I’ll tell you the best thing about Trisha. So, when she started she was trying to get work with [real estate company] Trammell Crow, and that’s how she got into the hospitality business, was he was building the Anatole, Dallas, Texas, and she had done some restaurant work, but she wanted to get the restaurants in the Anatole, and she had no employees, so she hired a bunch of friends to come in, phones that weren’t even plugged in, put people at desks, and brought Trammell Crow in there and that’s how she got her job.

You have to be pretty fearless to build these big companies. When I was at Wilson some of my greatest moments when we were thinking of strategy and what we wanted to do, I would call her and say, ‘What do you think about this?’ And it was really kind of some sort of crazy idea that I had come up with, and she goes, ‘Well, just ask yourself what’s the worst thing that could happen?’ That was the business plan, like what’s the worst thing that could happen? It wouldn’t work and then we would just stop doing it. So, that is one of the great lessons that I’ve learned from her, and I constantly have to remind myself of that, because you could be very gun shy about doing certain things and she instilled in me, ‘Listen, what we do isn’t going to kill anybody. We’re not finding the cure for cancer.’ Maybe if we were erecting buildings and dealing with engineers, but interior design that’s all the soft spot stuff. So, it’s about being a little bit fearless I think.

SSR: So, speaking of being fearless, you decided to take a leap of faith and go help WATG build Wimberly Interiors after a good amount of time. But why did you decide to take your career in a different direction and try something new?

MM: Wilson had been changing a bit for our company, and as you know now they’ve been sold to the Chinese. So, I was there when there was an equity partner that was involved, and the equity partner came in before ’08, when Oprah Winfrey was our client, when I was working with Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, when it was a really sexy, fun business to be in. And then after ’08, it sort of all came crashing down on us, suddenly the rules had changed a bit, and Trisha always said do great design and financial success will follow. And that was absolutely our mantra. And it started to feel a little bit different, but what really did it was, and I’m probably just getting a little bit too schmaltzy, but I had mentored and raised a lot of kids in this business. And I saw them starting to get married and have families and leave, and I thought, ‘God, I’ve been here for so long.’ This is when it dawned on me. What happened was there was a potential client, who I thought was a potential client, who turned out to be a headhunter who came to my office, went out totally on his own to find me. And when he told me the proposition of its WATG and they want you to run interiors for them, it is the only only architecture firm that I ever would have left Wilson for. Well, any firm that I would have left Wilson for. I had worked with on the St. Regis in Singapore, I’d worked with them on projects in California, just really great guys who’ve worked with the great design firms, and they knew that they weren’t doing it very well.

When you start to line all that up, I realized, I did very little due diligence, it’s kind of scary what I based my decision on. But I decided that if I don’t do this, I’m going to become the old lady who stayed too long and had nothing good to say, which I run in to some of those ladies every once in a while. And listen, I run into guys who do that, but I’m just talking about myself, and I knew that I had one or two more good moves in me, and I just needed to do it.

SSR: Obviously, you don’t regret it because now you’ve been there almost eight years. What has it been like forming this interiors group in a bigger architecture firm?

MM: Scary. Scary. Scary. If you look at Wilson now, they’re owned by the Chinese and architectural group. If you look at HBA, they’re owned by Goldmantis, which isn’t an architecture but it’s millwork and everything else. If you look at Deborah Lloyd Forrest, she’s merged. If you look at BBG, they’ve merged with HOK. So, when I did it, it was still thought that, ‘You’re going to a bad side by going to the architects.’ And that was a little bit scary, and maybe ignorance is bliss, but for some reason I thought I could pull it off. So, when I joined, if you can imagine, so 30 years that you’ve built your career, you know who to have lunch with, you know who are the nice people in the schoolyard, who the mean girls are, you know who the head honcho is, and you build this comfort level. Well, it’s like starting a new school all over again, and I had to, no one knew me, and I had to win hearts and minds, and I still say to this day our first line of clients are the architects. They’re the first guys in a room for a project, so I have to tell you, they’ve been insanely supportive, and the only reason that Wimberly is where it is today is because of the horsepower or WATG and that brand, it’s just incredible. But they’re also an incredible group of professionals and super-talented architects.

I will say that we’re a trust, so we’re an employee-owned firm. It has that family atmosphere that Wilson had, even though Wilson was global, it had that real family feel to it, which is really important to me. People asked me, right after it happened, people were like, ‘If I had known that you were looking, I would have come after you.’ And I think that people don’t understand that that’s the only firm that I would have left for. People also ask me, ‘Why didn’t you start your own firm?’ I’m good with a group, I’m not good solo. I like to have lots of people around me.

SSR: In eight years, you’ve had amazing growth.

MM: We’ve had amazing growth. What we’re really lucky about is that people have had incredible faith in us to take a leap of faith with us. I will say that I think we really arrived with Ted Jacobs and Aliya Khan from Starwood hired us to do the first Bentley suite in New York. We got a lot of press out of that, we got a lot of work out of that, and that’s when we could really put our flag in. I will say Host was incredibly loyal to us, and Helen Jorgenson just hired us to do a project pretty darned quickly, which was great. To be honest with you, I had made a verbal agreement with Trisha that I would never use the portfolio, I would never take a single employee, and I would never go after clients, and I didn’t. And what’s been really nice is that we’re working with clients that we’ve never worked with before, which is pretty liberating to be honest with you. We’ve been able to forge ahead on our own, which also feels really good.

SSR: That’s pretty impressive that you said all that to Trisha.

MM: We were just emailing last night. It was her birthday in August, but she just got her birthday present last night. Listen, this is how I think, I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but I really believe that all I have is my reputation, and I try to be an honest, good person. I’ve watched people leave firms—and I also believe in karma—and my mother always said, her two great lines were: ‘Margaret, two wrongs don’t make a right,’ which I always use. And the other one is, ‘Treat people how you would want to be treated.’ I just live my life that way, and Trisha not only was my employer, but she’s a dear, dear friend of mine, so that was really important to me to maintain.

SSR: You spent 30 years together growing a firm.

MM: It wasn’t just that. We exchanged Christmas presents, birthday presents. She was at both my parents’ funerals when I was 25 years old. I was with her longer than I’ve been with my husband, so she was like a, I don’t want to say a sister or a mother, but she was a combination of both of those. She absolutely opened the world to me that I did not know existed.

SSR: And now that you’re at Wimberly, what are some of the great projects that you’re working on? What are you trying to do with the firm to kind of push the limits and do some great work?

MM: First of all, you can’t do anything without great talent. That’s absolutely got to be the foundation. I can’t do any of this without my great teams. And it’s scary when you build a brand because you could sit there and go, ‘So is the honeymoon over?’ or ‘We’ve built this, now what do we do?’ And I also believe that when you look at brands in any industry, you can kill a brand a whole lot quicker than it takes to build a brand, and we wanted to make sure that we were moving in the right strategic direction. All of my studio directors, we work together to talk about, now it’s about growth. So Raj Chandnani is a huge part of that, with our strategic proposition, and what markets we need to go into, and what we need to do. Right now, we’re viewed as luxury within the market. We’re doing a Four Seasons in Cartagena, we’re doing more Belmond train cars out of London, we are doing a 10-bedroom private home in the center of Paris. We’re known for luxury, but as I’ve always said, you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket, and quite honestly, my designers need to be challenged and they need to work outside the box, so we’re looking at bringing some talent in that can change up who we are. I was talking to someone recently, and they walked in, just a really cool guy, and I said, ‘It’s perfect that you don’t look like us and you don’t sound like us and that’s exactly why we love you.’ So it’s really about growth to make sure that we can cover other segments of the market. We want to be in more lifestyle, limited service. We really want to make our residential more robust. Our F&B has been lagging behind, so that’s important for us as well, so those are the things that we’re looking at right now.

SSR: And let’s talk a little bit about these Belmond train cars because I think it’s really interesting how the trip is becoming as exciting as the destination, which is happening with airplanes and cruise ships and now these luxury train cars, which to me says a lot about where this industry is headed and how travel is changing. Has that been an exciting project for you?

MM: It’s been incredibly exciting. So London did the first one that launched two months ago, and it is booked three years out. They are now getting ready to do, I think it’s five more train cars, so the whole concept of how they do this is so fascinating. Singapore is also working on a train car for Belmond as well, and what’s interesting is, like a hotel, it’s a sense of place of where is the train car going to be? So the train car they’re doing out of Asia has got a spa car in it, and the one that London’s doing has got a dining car, a living room car, and then three bedroom cars. They’re very, very fast track, but it’s that whole experience because I very much agree with you, even when you start to look at not just how you get there, but I think when you really look at what is the hotel room.

I was just talking to someone in London that I had a meeting with, and they’re looking at doing windowless hotel rooms, and they’re doing it right now. I found that fascinating. We had a debate in our office. I said, ‘You know what? I don’t necessarily need a window. I don’t, actually.’ And if there is this sort of faked out view or scenery, I don’t open the windows in my hotel, and also too, depending on what the view is. So I think the whole experience is really changing. I love the glamping concept; I love just building platforms and doing something. I think that it’ll tie in different experiences that we’re talking about. This morning we were talking about in our office, I’m like, ‘Why don’t you see anyone aside from in Nashville jamming in a lobby? Why don’t you see an artist-in-residence? Why don’t you see any of that?’ And I think that the whole experiential thing will constantly be evolving. We’re just going to have to top ourselves all the time.

SSR: It makes your job more fun and harder at the same time.

MM: It can hurt your brain sometimes.

SSR: Whhat are some of your biggest challenges at work? Besides the industry always changing, what else kind of keeps you up at night?

MM: I’ll tell you what keeps me up at night. It’s probably management. Management keeps me up at night. And how do you keep growing the business without it getting stale. We don’t want to be a one-trick wonder. We don’t want to be that. And a lot of it has to do with keeping your talent motivated, and you don’t want to paint yourself into one box. We have a couple of projects that are up for awards this year, and it’s all super high-end luxury, and London is doing some stuff now, they’re doing senior living, which is really interesting. I know that my team in New York loves doing residential, they love doing that, but you’ve got to always keep them motivated, too. So that’s mainly what keeps me up at night is having the right talent and managing all of it.

SSR: So you have an office in London, New York, LA, and Singapore.

MM: Then we have satellite offices in Shanghai and in Dubai. We knew we had to have an office [in Shanghai] because we had just opened Suning Bellagio, and I remember going in there two years ago and getting on the phone, saying, ‘We’ve got to move people over here. We’ve got to get people on the ground to make sure this project is a success.’ We knew that we had to have a project manager, we needed an FF&E person, so we have four people in Shanghai right now.

Dubai, we knew that we needed to establish an office. We had a [business development] guy there, but we were doing the Kempinski Mall of the Emirates, and we were doing that renovation, and as you know, doing a renovation in the same city that you’re in is challenging enough, let alone halfway across the world. So we have a project manager, FF&E coordinator, and an architect in Dubai. That’s where we are right now.

We’re looking at doing it very organically. Wherever the need is, if we can, I don’t want to say do a pop-up, but if we need to go in and have people on the ground, we’re nimble enough that we can do that. And if we can partner up with someone, or if we can find some opportunity that makes sense for the short term, it may become longterm. So we’re doing it very organically.

SSR: And does that help, I mean, seeing it now in Shanghai and Dubai.

MM: It’s been huge. And that’s part of being fearless. We’re going to expand Shanghai, and we’re going to add architects, and I think landscaper planners. It’s about not being afraid to fail, and that’s the thing about it. You can pitch your tent, and if you need to break it down and get out of town, you can do that, too. So that has been really helpful for us. Dubai, we’re trying to still figure it out. Saudi has suddenly become a huge market for us. How we grow that studio, time will tell, but Saudi could be a tremendous market.

SSR: And it probably has helped with your clients and showing them that you’re all in, because collaboration goes both ways. You giving a little bit more might prove longer term, to have these relationships with these clients continue.

MM: Absolutely. The way that we got the 10-bedroom house in Paris is crazy. So who wouldn’t want to do a 10-bedroom house in Paris? We weren’t even looking for it, and when we did Kempinski Mall of the Emirates, it’s Majid Al Futtaim. So there are two Al Futtaim families, so someone went from working for Majid and went over to work for the Al Futtaim Group, which is the cousin that owns all the car dealerships. And someone went to go work for him, Al Futtaim was doing a house, and he was looking for someone to finish it up and do the interior design, and he was struggling with the whole thing, and the gentleman who had worked for Majid Al Futtaim said, ‘You need to call these people in New York, and they will get it done for you.’ So you never know. It’s not only a small industry, but it’s a small world. We always talk about this, too. It’s funny, clients don’t remember the great things that you did for them, but they remember the last “oops” that you made. And we were very successful at the Kempinski Mall of the Emirates, and that led to something that we didn’t even see coming.

SSR: And a 10-bedroom house is almost like a small little hotel.

MM: Well, I keep joking with the owner, I said, ‘You know, if you ever want to sell this, this is a Soho House.’ They’ve dug down two stories to put in an indoor pool, and the conversations that we’re having, we call the living room the country club downstairs, and it could be. We keep joking about it, but it could be a Soho House.

SSR: As the leader of Wimberly Interiors, how involved are you still with the design details? How do you handle it?

MM: The one thing that I was taught is to hire people that are better than you and let them do their jobs. I’m not involved in every single project. There are clients who request that I be involved, and I love that, and there are projects that I really want to be involved with and I love that.

And I think that the most valuable thing that I bring to a project is my experience. I’ll just give you the best recent example. So when we were doing the Rosewood down in Baha Mar, and that was a challenging renovation. We had to transform that property and we had Silver Hill Studio doing all of the murals in the lobby, but they were key to the design for the lobby. So I said to my team probably three months before opening, ‘Where are we on the murals?’ And they said, ‘The contractor has it under control.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean? What does that mean?’ They said, ‘We put it on our finish schedule that the murals, they’ve got to contact Silver Hill.’ I said, ‘If you’re expecting that to happen, you are mental.’ I called them Silver Hill. I said, ‘Have you been contacted?’ They said no. So then I called a contractor on site. I’m like, ‘Have you called Silver Hill?’ They said no. So luckily, I have a very good relationship with the owner at CTF. And I called him up and I said,’This is a big deal. This is a really big deal that we have to have happen.’ He goes,’Well, I know nothing about it.’ It’s things like that, but we got it done. We had conference calls after conference calls, and it was critical because they were painting on site.

The definition of getting a job done is not just conveying the information, it’s not just counting on someone else to get it done, it’s double checking and triple checking those certain things that you take for granted are going to happen but don’t necessarily happen. I think from my experience I probably had enough hell-raising experiences that have kept me up at night where I know those pressure points to look at. So I think that that’s probably where I’m best suited.

SSR: Was there one [experience] early in your career that you remember?

MM: One of them involved a freight elevator.I always have my team check the size of the freight elevator. And another one was when I was doing a project out of New Orleans, and I remember waking up in the middle of the night just when you have that a-ha moment, you’re hyperventilating, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to happen here?’ And how do you deal with the desk? A millworker was making the top of the desk and then we had a metal worker making the base, two totally different people doing it. And I thought, ‘oh my God, what if the top doesn’t fit on the base?’ You know when you have those sorts of crazy moments. I called the purchasing agent the next day, who I don’t think they’re any longer in business. This woman, she’s still in the business somewhere, I called her. I was just watching my phone until it was 9 a.m. in LA, and I called her and I said, ‘Oh my God, Verna. I woke up in the middle of the night.’ She goes, ‘Don’t worry. I sent the desk to the metal worker.’ So the moral to that story is that you want to be working with a really good seasoned team that knows all the pitfalls because you can’t possibly think of them all. We’re lucky also too that, in all the work that we’ve been doing since we’ve been Wimberly, we’ve had great teams, great clients, great operators, and great consultants helping us along the way.

SSR: Are there things that even people on your team or other designers do that are little pet peeves?

MM: I’ve got a few of them. Listen, I’m super old school and I was trained to design to budgets. And there are some pet peeves in my office where people will be like, ‘That’s the purchasing agent’s job.’ That annoys me quite a bit. Also, I think that when you do that, a big part of it is that you lose control. When you leave it to somebody else to do, you’ve forfeited control over what it is you want this team to look like and feel like. So that’s one of my pet peeves.

Another one of my pet peeves is, and I’ve learned to control it a bit. I’m very much, everyone has to be at work at a certain time. And I’ve learned with Millennials that you can’t necessarily be a clock watcher. I’ve learned to loosen up. I meditate every morning and I think about it. I’ve learned to loosen up, but there are different ways. I used to always say, ‘I don’t care how you get there, just get there at the time and the place that you need to get there.’ But the game has changed a bit, and I have to get rid of my sort of old-school mentality. I really have to learn to get rid of that.

SSR: Talking about the meditation, that’s something new that you’ve added.

MM: I’ve done it for a couple of years now. I go home to my husband and he really does coach me. He’s like, ‘You are completely out of control. You are just completely off the rails.’ So I started meditating and everyone knows this. I love Andrew from Headspace. I’m with him every morning in this one chair in my living room. My sister this week was like, ‘I have a meditation pillow.’ And I was like no, I sit in one chair in the morning and it’s how I start my day. I’m a super early riser. I talk to Singapore, I’ll talk to London, or Dubai. And I’ve realized I need to cut that off because it’ll get me so revved up and crazy. I realized I needed to set that aside. So I meditate every morning. Then I go workout, and then I come home, and then I see the hell storm that are emails or some issue going on. Then I deal with it.

SSR: Has your husband said it’s helped you?

MM: I’ve been married for 33 years so he said that it has, but listen, our husbands are great. They look out for us and they worry about us. Mike, a lot of times is up in the country, but for the last several months, he’s been living in New York. And he’ll walk in at about 4:30 in the morning and go, ‘Were you on the phone?’ And I’ll say, ‘Of course I’m on the phone.’ And all these guys know that they can call me super early in the morning. So I try to keep that to a minimum. But listen, we all are a work in progress until the day we die.

SSR: And work-life balance is hard.

MM: Well, you have three kids. God bless you. I just have a husband in New York and I have three dogs that I haven’t seen in months, but I will tell you, working moms are true heroes to me. I mean that.

SSR: So looking back now and everything you’ve done, and these amazing projects  and great clients, did you ever think you’d end up where you are today?

MM: Not at all. You got to remember this was the ’70s.  I remember when I told [my mother] I was going to get married, but she said, ‘You don’t have to do this, you know?’ And that was the one thing that I was like, whoa. But as I said, my parents passed away at 25 and if I had time to really sit down and ask her to explain that statement, but back then it was like, have a family. And the fact that I don’t have kids is even still very controversial.

I remember guys in meetings. It was amazing how guys would be like, ‘So do you have any kids?’ I know it’s a point of conversation. I’d be like, ‘No,’ and they’re like, ‘Why?’ It’s very interesting. When I grew up, you were supposed to get married and have kids and maybe have a job. My husband always says, he goes, ‘I remember you when you were like a stoner windsurfer.’ And I really was. He goes, ‘You didn’t have a care in the world.’ And he said a switch flipped. He’s convinced it’s when my parents both died, which I don’t know really what that means.

But I think that for me, I was so lucky to find the world that I did. It was miraculous for me. I just loved it. It was like my crack; it was my addiction. This whole world opened up to me that I just couldn’t get enough of, and it wasn’t just the work, it was the people. The first time I went on a plane, I was in high school. So it wasn’t like I traveled the world or anything.

SSR: And now you have.

MM: I have. I’m very lucky, insanely lucky.

SSR: I always say that this industry is special, especially because of the people in it. You don’t find this level of smart, creative, motivated people that you find in most industries, but I might be biased after 16 years.

MM: I don’t think that you’re biased. So my husband was on Wall Street and he was a trader. He’s retired for quite some time, but I would hear stories. My sister’s in the garment industry, and my brother’s in aviation. I find nothing more enjoyable than the fact that we can sit in the room with our competitors (and maybe there’s some competitors we can’t sit in the same room with), but that we can sit in a room with our competitors and have open dialogue that makes us all better. I haven’t seen that in any other industry. I haven’t.

SSR: No, it’s very true. And it’s something I think that’s even gotten better throughout the years.

MM: You guys in your business have been key to all of that. And it’s not just because I’m sitting in your office talking to you, but you have helped create a community that is pretty darn special.

SSR: How has the industry changed? It’s changed so much, but what do you think are maybe one or two of the biggest changes you’ve seen in your career?

MM: It’s interesting. It’s not just about designing hotels, it’s understanding what ails people, what motivates people. Not only the great things that are happening in the world, but what some of the challenges in the world are. And I think that the whole concept of creating community in hotels right now is interesting. I was on a round table and it was someone from Clodagh’s office, as a matter of fact (and that woman is such a genius, it’s ridiculous), they said the biggest ailment plaguing the world right now is loneliness. We would never talk about stuff like that. It’s like, is it pretty? Has it got a sense of place? Is it appropriate? Does it work for the brand? And I think that the conversation is getting longer and more interesting. That’s what I find. It’s not just about nuts and bolts and designing a space. It goes much deeper than that. And what I love about the industry is that it used to be all the big players back in the ’80s. It was HBA, it was Wilson, and a whole bunch of other ones, but now you’re seeing different firms coming into the space who had never done hospitality before, which is really refreshing. And I used to say that residential influences hospitality, but I think it’s flipped again. I think that hospitality is influencing residential, which is exciting.

SSR:  Yeah, and a lot of other niches as well like coworking, and office space, and even healthcare.

MM: Healthcare, without a doubt..

SSR: I’ve said this a couple of times. I think it’s the most exciting time, at least in my career, that this industry has seen.

MM: You think about innovation and how they use that in hotels. It will completely change how we work. I was just watching on the news this morning that I think Yale developed an artificial skin that can make inanimate objects move, can give motion to them. So they took this skin and put it on a stuffed animal. And suddenly, the stuffed animal was walking all over the place. Like for me, I’ve just mastered my iPhone for God’s sakes, you know? That’s as far as I’ve gone. So when you think about things like that and where the world can go with all of this, it’s scary, but it’s really cool.

SSR: So what’s next for you? Is there something you haven’t done that you still want to do?

MM: I think the growth for us will be really important. So WATG never had a plan to open a New York studio. I just told them I wouldn’t live anywhere else. They’re like, ‘Okay, I guess we have to have an office for you.’ Now it’s about me pulling back and getting someone in that studio to help lead it so that I can focus on growth globally, which is really important. I travel a ton now, but it’s really getting that growth right, which is really important. So I think it’s the second stage. I helped build the brand. Now it’s taking the brand to the next level.

SSR: Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure, as always.