The Amazing Rise of Trisha Wilson’s Interior-Architectural-Design Firm

photography by Stephen Karlisch

Oprah Winfrey, Andre Agassi, and Giorgio Armani all sing her praises, but last October in Shanghai, Dallas interior architectural designer Trisha Wilson received the Chinese Midas touch.

It came from Yue-Sai Kan, an entertainer People magazine calls the most famous woman in China. Her prime-time TV show draws 800 million viewers a week and features guests ranging from Jordan’s Queen Noor to actress Catherine Deneuve.

Yue-Sai’s paean to Wilson took place at the entertainer’s spacious, impeccably decorated 15th-floor condo overlooking Shanghai. There was a buffet of Chinese and Western food; performing bartenders; a series of performances by a group of elite Chinese college students; and a veritable national musical Olympics with traditional costume, dance, and singing—all in Wilson’s honor.

“It was Yue-Sai’s crowd,” recalls Dr. Leonard Riggs Jr., founder of Dallas’ EmCare emergency-medical company and a member of the Texas entourage accompanying Wilson. “Designers [attended, as did] bank presidents, CEOs, and 30 or 40 of the city’s top VIPs.”

When he first met Trisha Wilson in 1969, fresh out of the University of Texas, Riggs says he knew she was “something special.” But of course he had no idea she would end up being one of the world’s top international luxury-hotel designers. Not only does Wilson’s Dallas-based interior-architectural-design firm bring in more than $50 million in annual revenue, but her company—with 350 employees and offices across the globe—has glammed and glitzed more than 1 million five-star hotel rooms worldwide.

Wilson Associates has received so many Gold Key Awards—an Academy Award-level distinction in the hospitality-design industry—that they fill an entire hallway of the firm’s offices on Turtle Creek Boulevard. In 30 years, the company has catapulted into a sphere of design influence coveted by the world’s wealthiest, with 60 percent of its work outside the United States. And the proud, driven, self-made gal from North Texas now creates stunning environments for more than 25 of the world’s top billionaires.

Among Wilson’s clients and friends are the likes of Las Vegas hotelier Sheldon Adelson, Sol Kerzner (the “Donald Trump” of South Africa), designer Giorgio Armani, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud, industrialist Lakshmi Mittal—the steel businessman who recently paid the most for any home in history, music producer Quincy Jones, Oprah Winfrey (who’s stayed at Wilson’s South African home), tennis pros Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, and the highest high-rollers in the Middle East and Asia. 

From hotels and casinos to palaces, private residences, and 747s, Wilson has worked in many spectacular places. Consider, for example, the 60,000-square-foot palace she created for an 11-year-old Saudi prince (design work on the palace started when the lad was 9); or the exercise swimming pool for expensive “racing camels”; or the swank chalets at the first indoor ski resort, complete with snow dome, in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates; or the 10.2 million-square-foot casino resort in China called the Venetian Macau, where the gaming room alone is 550,000 square feet. (By comparison, a typical Las Vegas casino is about 120,000 square feet.)

If you ask Wilson how a nice girl from Dallas got to the crest, she’ll smile her beautiful smile, crinkle her clear aqua eyes, and say: by knowing what to do and what not to do, by asking a lot of questions—and by having and using great connections.

CHINESE GLITZ: Wilson Associates designed this lobby at The Venetian Macau Resort Hotel, a gargantuan casino complex in Macau, China. photography courtesy of Venetian Macau Ltd.

FROM RESTAURANTS TO HOTELS
Trisha Wilson grew up in a small cottage in Highland Park in what she describes as a dysfunctional family. With a degree in interior design from the University of Texas School of Architecture, she made $4,000 her first year after graduation selling mattresses at Titche-Goettinger, a now-defunct Dallas department store. For fun, she and her girlfriends would go bowling during the lunch hour.

So how did a mattress saleswoman make the leap into big-time interior design? An objective observer might say with equal parts charm, curiosity, and chutzpah.

It started during one college summer, Wilson recalls, when she worked for Dallas architect Harry Hoover designing, of all things, church stained-glass windows. Reared as a Christian Scientist, she initially had no idea what she was doing.

“I looked up leaded glass in the Yellow Pages and researched how it was made, and I designed a few,” she says. “I don’t know if he ever used one.”

Dallas was a dry city at the time, but a law permitting liquor by the drink passed in 1971. So a new restaurant serving food and drinks with a train theme, called the Railhead, announced plans to open at Greenville Avenue and Park Lane. Wilson, who knew nothing at all about trains, wanted to design the interior.

“We had these family friends growing up who owned a model train mecca called Halls Hobby House,” Wilson says. “I called Bobbye Hall and said, tell me everything you know about trains.”

Which is how Wilson and Fred Merrill, her partner at the time, designed the Railhead with such smashing success that more restaurant jobs soon followed. Next, Wilson designed the original Chili’s and Kitty Hawk eateries for Larry Levine.

She loved doing restaurants, now proliferating in Dallas, but Wilson heard that developer Trammell Crow was building a huge new hotel in Dallas called the Loews Anatole—a hotel that would be loaded with seven restaurants. She wrote Crow a letter that said, “I have some ideas for your restaurants and hotel that you cannot live without.” Crow read the letter and phoned Wilson, who proceeded to make up ideas on the spot—and to fudge the number of employees in her tiny, fledgling company.

Crow told her he wanted a Chinese motif everywhere—one restaurant was called The Plum Blossom—and envisioned filling the hotel with Asian art, Crow’s great passion. Crow had brought back so much jade from Asia, Wilson jokes that she was afraid there wasn’t any left on the continent. Crow connected with a number of Chinese artists, and Wilson recalls one in particular whose work was “incredible.” He was admired in China as a traditional Chinese ink painter of the Ling Nan School. Because that artist, Wing-Lin Kan, spoke only Chinese, his daughter came along as his interpreter. Her name: Yue-Sai Kan.

After completing the Anatole project in 1975, Wilson needed another project to keep herself and her handful of employees busy. She started cold-calling companies, including the Sheraton hotel company, who told her in so many words that she was small potatoes. But she did persuade Sheraton to stop by her office for a consultation. The only problem: Wilson had no offices.

It just so happened, however, that the office next to her cubbyhole space on Carlisle Street was vacant. Wilson persuaded the landlord to let her rent it for a day, and out came her budding showmanship skills. Wilson brought in a sign painted with her company name, telephones with cords that were never plugged in, and drafting tables. Friends sat at the drafting tables to make the place look busy. The Sheraton people stopped in, liked what they saw, and have been clients ever since.

“We’ve always womped up the presentation,” says Snow Blackerby, who’s been with the company for 30 years. “It’s pure showmanship. Trisha says to show them true Texas hospitality—be genuinely friendly and woo the heck out of the clients.”

Beyond materials boards and textile swatches, Wilson’s employees typically work night and day before a presentation, often creating one entire room of a project, complete with furniture and detailed accessories. Food is catered in, and the entire staff focuses on details to dazzle the client and showcase the environment’s ambiance.   

A few years ago, actor Kevin Costner asked Wilson Associates to design a potential project in Deadwood, S.D., called the Dunbar Resort. (Alas, the project never came to fruition.) Wilson, who had seen Costner’s newly released Dancing With Wolves flick, planned an elaborate “Dancing With Wolves” presentation. At the last minute, she even ran to a nearby Ralph Lauren store and bought a whalebone jacket to dress the part.

DOING GOOD: Wilson in South Africa with children from her Waterberg Academy, which is supported by The Wilson Foundation. photography courtesy of Wilson Associates

PALATIAL LIVING
In the late 1980s, Wilson received a phone call from a man named Sol Kerz­ner, who said he’d heard of her work at the Anatole. Kerzner was the brains behind a huge resort outside Johannesburg, South Africa, the only gaming area in the country, called Sun City. Completed in the late 1970s, it consisted of four hotels, a casino, a game preserve, and two 18-hole, Gary Player-designed golf courses. Kerzner now wanted Wilson’s firm to design the latest addition to his pet project—a 343-room resort called The Palace of the Lost City.

“I flew to Johannesburg,” Wilson remembers. “From there it was a 1.5-hour drive to the middle of nowhere. We were surrounded by a game preserve, a lake, and nothing else.” 

This was where Kerzner wanted a four-star resort, a Las Vegas-like paradise to complement Sun City in the middle of the bush, in an area where legend claims an ancient civilization once enjoyed palatial living.

Lost City would be one of Wilson Associates’ biggest challenges: a $2 million design fee for a fairy-tale resort residence with exquisite architectural detail and mosaics, design motifs, frescoes, molding, columns, and pillars in a country where virtually no subcontractors existed. Craftsmen and artisans not only had to be located, but shipped in and housed. Almost everything—lamps, carpet, and fabrics—had to be imported. Without realizing it at the time, Wilson Associates was exporting U.S. knowledge and design for the South Africans to replicate, implement, and use beyond the Lost City. For example, there are now four companies doing pre-cast stone work in the area; when Wilson first flew to Johannesburg, there were none. 

During her work on Kerz­ner’s project, Africa and its people captured Wilson’s heart. She bought a home and private game lodge on a reserve three hours north of Johannesburg, which remains her haven today. On her village travels, she found a primitive burned-wood plaque with carvings of animals that had been created by a farm night-watchman. Loving his work, Wilson contracted with the watchman to create several huge panels to hang on the exterior walls at Lost City. Wilson made sure the watchman was well-paid for his craft, and he wrote her a personal letter of thanks.

“It was written like a second-grade child might write,” she recalls. The watchman told Wilson exactly what he was going to buy with the money he had earned and said he hoped she’d enjoy his work in her new home—apparently believing Lost City was Wilson’s personal residence.

It was a good time to be in Africa, she says. Nelson Mandela had been released from prison and the populace was hopeful about creating new jobs, industries, and growth. Wilson Associates finally completed the Palace of the Lost City project in 1991. Then she set her sites on the Middle East.

ASKING QUESTIONS

Around that time, Trisha Wilson was meeting with a fabulously wealthy sheikha in Abu Dhabi. The sheikha wanted to hire Wilson Assoc­iates to design one of her homes: a 160,000-square-foot palace with a dining room that would seat 350 guests. Back then, like most of us, Wilson didn’t know much about the veils and coverings Middle Eastern women wore—much less what they were called. But Wilson, who says she always “over-questions,” couldn’t stifle her curiosity.

“I can see under your robe when you move around,” she told the sheikha, “and I can tell you have a great-looking Chanel suit under there and a fabulous David Webb cuff on your arm.”

In fact, the woman was drenched in jewelry.

“Why in the world would you put that big black robe over all that great-looking stuff?” she asked?

Wilson’s associate design director, Jim Rimelspach, squirmed in horror.

But the sheikha loved Wilson’s candor, openness, and questions. So, not only did Wilson  Associates snag the 160,000-square-foot project and more, but there was a gift waiting for Wilson following their next meeting: a diamond watch worth at least $200,000.

Not every client has showered her with jewelry, but many have blessed her business with word-of-mouth endorsements. Wilson is bullish on relationships—both personal ties and relationships within her company. Indeed, she believes relationships are the foundation of her firm’s success. If Wilson’s design projects were a family tree, the Railhead and Anatole projects would be like the grandparents, with branches from each leading to an amazingly robust family of geniuses with quirky ties and connections—like Yue-Sai Kan.

Those connections have a ripple effect. For example, Wilson introduced Yue-Sai Kan to one of South Africa’s leading clothing designers, Marianne Fassler. After completing the Lost City—on time and on budget—Wilson became Sol Kerzner’s preferred designer, working on his famous Atlantis resorts and completing a total of 14 Kerzner projects, including The Royal Mirage hotel in Dubai. Kerzner currently has her working on his newest Atlantis on one of Dubai’s so-called Palm Islands. An Arab sheikh introduced Wilson to Giorgio Armani; now she’s serving as a design consultant for a hotel group in Milan and Dubai for the famed fashion designer.

‘UNORGANIZED ORGANIZATION’
At another point in the 1990s, Wilson was meeting with a major East Coast developer in his corporate boardroom. The developer’s son sat in one seat, dozing. As the team made their presentation, the developer removed his socks and shoes, pulled out clippers, and began clipping his toenails. Wilson was appalled, but she never missed a beat.

Handling clients who self-pedicure during presentations may not be on the Harvard Business School radar, but managing creative people is. That’s why the Harvard B-school’s graduate-level case study looked at Wilson Associates several years ago and asked Wilson, how do you manage creative people effectively?

Her answer: “I don’t.” Instead, Wilson believes in what she calls an “unorganized organized organization,” and refuses to have a set business plan. If you had told her that Wilson Associates would someday open an office in Cochin, India, or become a name brand in China, she says, she wouldn’t have believed it. In fact, she says, planning sometimes makes you overlook opportunities and limits your knowledge.

“No amount of imagination,” she says, “can know the limitless possibilities out there for you.”

Wilson believes she is a “generalist” with a knack for finding the right people for a position. She then leaves them alone to do their jobs. Employees have office hours and accountability but also flexibility, and they have fun—including elaborate, theme-based parties that sometimes rival (or exceed) client presentations. Wilson values her employees—15 or 20 have been with her for more than two decades—and making money is No. 3 on her list of company priorities. The first priority is great design; the second is giving back and caring about people. If you do the first two, Wilson says, the third will take care of itself.

Wilson is also bullish on “B”-grade students, because she herself was one, and because the “A” students will find their way. In 1997 she established The Wilson Foundation scholarships to help send disadvantaged kids to college. Wilson seeks only “B” students with full lives for the program, such as one current scholarship recipient who works and helps care for seven siblings, yet still finds time to volunteer. 

NEXT UP: THE WORLD
A client called Trisha Wilson last fall: “We just bought Siberia, and we’d like you to work on a project for us there.”

Not the real Siberia, of course, but the “island of Siberia” in a development of man-made islands off Dubai. The World is a 300-island project, constructed in the shape of the world’s continents, intended to create still more islands of pristine playground beach for the world’s uber-wealthy.

Wilson Associates will be there.

The World is being developed by a company called Nakheel, whose executive chairman is Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem. Nakheel’s flagship properties are the three man-made, palm-tree-shaped islands also off the Dubai coast, called the Palm Islands.

Wilson Associates will be there as well.

Meantime, Sol Kerzner’s newest Atlantis resort, located on the tip of the Palm Islands, is scheduled to open this fall. If clients thought the Venetian Macau was amazing, wait until they see what Wilson has on the drawing board for Atlantis The Palm: a series of two-story guest rooms, the lower level underwater with the beds facing a window into a giant aquarium.

“It will be like sleeping in a fish tank,” Wilson says.

So how does Wilson stay grounded, mingling in a world of palace-owning sultans and billionaires?  Simple: She returns to her home in South Africa as often as possible.

“The bush gives me balance and boundaries,” Wilson says. “When you see 25,000 people living with dirt floors and no electricity, you get grounded really fast.”

Not that she begrudges the billionaires. “I’m just glad I know the difference,” she says.

She’s also giving back, in spades. In Africa, The Wilson Foundation provides educational and health-care programs, which includes AIDS prevention services. The foundation has also awarded $350,000 to U.S. high school graduates and has helped create Waterberg Academy in Mabatlane in the Limpopo Province of South Africa, which is notorious for high unemployment rates and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It was Waterberg that attracted the interest of Oprah Winfrey, whose producer called Wilson looking for design solutions for Winfrey’s school at Henley on Klip, Gauteng, south of Johannesburg.

Winfrey has stayed at Wilson’s home when she’s been in the area, and she doesn’t mind that, to use a cellphone, you sometimes have to scramble to the land’s highest nearby point—or that Internet connections are often impossible. In her African home, Wilson says, baboons or a tiger might imprison you in a tree house for an hour—or a day.

All that has helped Trisha Wilson put her golden-horseshoe world into perspective, and to “chill out” over the things she can’t control. If anything, dealing with people who think travel in a Learjet is “slumming” has made her more generous—and even more proud of her Dallas roots.

CEO SNAPSHOT
Trisha Wilson

Hometown gal: Born in Dallas; graduated from Highland Park High School
Personal: Single, no children; one dog, Charlie; owns a home in Highland Park; one in Beaver Creek, Colo.; and one in South Africa
Education: University of Texas School of Architecture, B.S. degree in major interior design
Business: Founder, chairman, and CEO of Wilson Associates, an interior-architectural-design firm based in Dallas, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, Shanghai, Cochin (India), and Johannesburg
Employees: 350 professionals including registered architects, accredited designers, design
assistants, and administrative staff 
Other Involvements: Founder, The Wilson Foundation; Executive Board, Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business; Board of Directors, JPMorgan Chase Dallas Region Advisory Board; Member, Commission of 125, The University of Texas at Austin; Development Board, The University of Texas at Austin