A BIG BIRTHDAY🥳🥳🥳

March 25, 2025
From Mrs. FabLab, With Love
I will be celebrating a major milestone birthday in April.  This means I have been a professional in the design community for 30 years, my first industry job having started when I was 20. 

But I have spent my entire life being a designer.   When I was 7 or 8, I was picking out bedding and curtains in the JCPenney catalog while the other kids looked at the toy section.  By age 10, I was drawing plans and elevations of my bedroom to get the layout right and make sure my art was at the right height.  I didn't know yet that they were called plans and elevations. 

Fast forward to 17 and I was refinishing furniture, painting paneling and spending any extra money at Kirkland's Home Decor. Don't judge! It was the 90's! And finally at 19, I unintentionally qualified for Selective Admissions to the Interior Design program at LSU having taken all of the pre-requisite art and drafting classes because they sounded fun.  I had no idea you could get a design degree until that letter came in the mail.  And all of a sudden I was a fulltime interior designer working for a Baton Rouge firm that focused on strip center retail and assisted living facilities.  It kicked my ass in all the best ways. A couple of years after that, I moved to Houston, found myself in corporate interiors and the rest is history.

Though I moved to a new role when we created FMW|FabLab, I never really left the commercial design industry and I course corrected our company every time we veered away. Even my closest friends are, or have been, somewhere inside this little bubble.  Suffice it to say, design is in my DNA.

At the risk of sounding cheesy, it is my life's work and an honor to be part of this community.  If you are also part of it, you know that we are special.  Not every industry has this thing we have.  We are a group of wildly creative beings changing the world and I love it!   

At FMW, it is our conviction to provide superior craftsmanship and provocative design on transformative projects for cool people.

We're in this together. You can always find me here.


 
SEVENTEEN FLOORS + FOURTEEN MONTHS
Between 2023 and 2024, we built 17 feature walls in collaboration with design firm HOK and builder Tellepsen for a corporate client's elevator lobbies in west Houston.  The HOK team reached out to us early and we were able to advise and assist with the design, materials and detailing. 

The Process

  • This project was going for LEED certification and the feature walls had a part to play.  During demo, existing bamboo wood was carefully removed, stacked and delivered to our shop. We pulled each slat from its parent panel, then planed, jointed and sanded them. Next we routed a channel on the back for special fasteners. Each plank also received a chamfer on the long edges to make the pattern more prominent.
 
  • Meanwhile the design team was doing shop drawings and preparing submittals for review by the architect.
 
  • Next the pattern was laid out on the fire rated plywood backer boards and boards were cut to length.  Specialty connectors were attached to both backer boards and slats so there was no visible hardware.
 
  • Simultaneously our metal team was making the 4' tall aluminum number trays. Then the numbers were laid out on the pattern and boards cut to receive them.
 
  • After final field verifications and minor tweaks, everything was disassembled and sent off for finishing.
 
  • You can see the full process as well as the installation in this 60 second video. 
60 seconds behind the scenes of building 17 feature walls!
TEACHING MOMENT: Did you know that hollow tubing is more rigid than solid bar? And it’s true for all shapes: round, square, etc.

Here’s why. The strength-to-weight ratio of a hollow tube is superior to a solid rod because of the tube’s inertia.

The inertia of a tube is greater than that of a rod, meaning it's not as easily changed.

Inertia can be defined as a property of matter by which it remains at the state of rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force. Inertia is the property of a body that resists changing its state of motion or state of rest. So in simple terms, hollow tubing will resist changing (bending) more than solid bar.  
Check out our YouTube channel for BTS and insider information on many of our project!
Have a question? Ask us here.
See all Insights posts
Sign up for our newsletter
Sign up
Legal
Privacy
2025 FMW|FabLab