Interior design director
Mary has worked as an interior designer for over 30 years. Starting her career in domestic interiors, focusing on tailor-made kitchens, she moved into retail design with the John Lewis Partnership in-house design department. Projects ranged from refurbishments with budgets of £200,000 to working in a three-person team of designers on new stores where the shopfitting content exceeded £3.5m.
She joined forces with David to found Tangent, specialising in hospitality and commercial catering interiors, drawing on her knowledge of food production and her eye for precise shopfitting detail. Projects have varied from developing a successful high street fast food franchise business to designing a quirky boutique hotel on the Eastbourne seafront.
As a consultant she has worked alongside Parker Roberts Design Partnership, producing staff catering facilities ranging from high end corporate staff restaurants, hospitality suites, satellite coffee & deli counters, break-out & chill zones for companies such as Credit Suisse, JP Morgan, PwC, BP, Zurich and Nationwide. This collaboration has also involved hospital cafes, school & college refectories and museum visitor facilities for National Museum of Wales, University of Wales Trinity St David, Basildon Hospital, Havering College and many more.
Mary is a graduate of Bristol UWE and has subsequently trained in AutoCAD and a variety of visualising tools but still likes to produce hand-drawn visuals to quickly capture and interpret a client’s brief.