Championing Equity Deserving Artists and Communities with Ashley Rumsey of Mason Studio

Hello and welcome to this episode of Conscious Design. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, and author of The Conscious Design Book. And today I'm excited to have Ashley here. She's the partner and co-founder at Mason Studio, an interior design agency that I think has a unique approach and a way of testing out ideas that I have never seen with an interior design firm or team before, and I'm really excited. So welcome to the episode.

Great. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Ian.

Yeah. So everybody loves a good origin story. So could you take us back a little bit in time to when you actually started your studio and got into it? How, how did you do, how did you do that?

Sure. Well, I hope I can live up to those expectations of a good origin story. Mason Studio started 12+ years ago. But before that, interior design and design in general has always been something that was near and dear to my heart growing up as a child. I always fundamentally understood that interior spaces really change the way you feel in space. I was one of those kids that always moved around my furniture in my bedroom and kind of sketching out floor plans and houses and I was really sensitive to my physical environment. So I went to school for interior design, and while at university, I met my business partner Stanley. And that was about 20-plus years ago now that we were in design school. And he and I, we say we're friendly competitors. We were friends in school, but we really appreciated and admired each other's work ethic, and we really pushed each other in terms of our projects and our development within design. From there, we worked at a number of firms together just as design students, as interns, and then as young designers. And we went our separate ways, you know, in the beginning of our career. But we always had in our minds that there was something that we wanted to contribute to the design industry here in Toronto where our business is based. And so about 13 years ago, I was on holiday and traveling in London in the UK where Stanley was working at the time, and he and I got together for a beer or two in a pub or two when we were in London. And, um, yeah, we're really just talking about what we could see for our futures and how we really wanted to carve out a path for ourselves that could really contribute to creating senses of belonging and using design as a way to make social change. And so perhaps it was our naive you know, youth where we were feeling the sense that let's just try this out and do this, you know, do something together. So Stanley ended up moving back to Canada, and that was about 13 years ago. We spent about 6 months preparing a business model, getting a website up and running, doing a, you know, photo shoot just to have some marketing material to get our business off the ground. And then Mason Studio was born.

Awesome. Well, I love, I love that this is something that you have been thinking about since you're a kid. You're aware that I don't— I wasn't aware of my room when I was a kid or, or that kind of thing. So it's, it's great. My mind was in other places and products. So it's, it's great that you have this. You've been thinking about this for your entire life, really, and now are able to bring that experience in college and doing the work and build it all into something where you're able to create amazing spaces. I think it's a great origin story.

Thank you.

So, yeah. So one of the things that really caught my attention when I found you guys is that you don't just design. And I feel like a lot of And I mean that in like a lot of people just design, but they don't really have a physical way to test out or feel or show people, hey, this is what it actually is like. Because like what you mentioned, right? It is a feeling like you can walk if you're aware of it, right? You have to pay attention. But if you do, when you walk into a space, you can have a very different feeling in your, in your body than you've walked into a different space. And so that's really— I think hard to communicate. And the same thing in product, like it's, it's one thing to see it on a screen, right? That looks cool. But there's a different thing to like hold and touch and feel what it is. And you guys have built a studio that you're able to test out and, and reconfigure and even show people. Could you talk a little about how, what made you decide to dive into that area? That nobody else I, that I know of at least is really doing.

Great. Well, thank you. Uh, yeah, experimentation I think is a phrase that we use often and, um, a method, a methodology, I guess you could say, to our approach to design. And I think that really started with both Stanley and I realizing that interior spaces, like you say, do change your mood. They change your physical interaction with objects. your social connections with people, you know, the way all of the senses are activated change the way that you interact and physically live within space. And so on Stanley, his background before finding his way to design is in sciences and in biological sciences. And prior to interior design for myself, I explored art and art history. And so we fundamentally realized that You know, art imitates life and design is an offshoot of art. And Stanley's science background is very much about experimentation and sort of creating understanding of why things occur. And so we use experimentation in a way to validate our assumptions. So interior design is very often assumed to be about just the way things look, you know, glossy pictures in magazines and, you know, luxurious spaces that are for the elites. But design is everywhere. You know, as you likely know, working in products, and all of us know. And so what we are trying to further achieve is, yes, create beautiful spaces that look good in magazines that we hope people say, you know, are stunning and beautiful, but that really do impact people in a positive way. And so creating a sense of belonging, creating a positive impact is something that we know that we can achieve in many ways. One, through this actual space, you know, the way people feel in the space, but then as designers, we have a lot of control over certain collaborators, certain materials that are specified, certain other aspects of the built environment, the process in which we come up with the designs and the way the spaces are built, that we can also have impact. So as we have grown in our careers, we've realized that it's not just about the outcome of the product, you know, the outcome of the spaces, but what can we do as business owners, what can we do as designers throughout the whole process to try to make as much positive social contributions and social impact as possible. And so this is a long way of getting to your question about experimentation. We do create a lot of experimentations in our physical studio and for clients and for collaborators that are more on the artistic side, I guess you could say, where they're more experimental installations. So there's spaces that are kind of a blend between art and interiors. And that's a way for us to, like I said, validate what we think about how spaces make people feel, how spaces make people interact. So in our physical studio, for instance, if we change the furniture arrangement, does that change the way that people work at those spaces? Are they more comfortable?

Mm-hmm.

Are they more focused? Or does it promote more socialization, more dynamic discussions? So we sort of use our physical space as a testing ground to better understand and observe how people act and interact with space.

That's awesome. And I love— I think I've said I see how you guys are able to kind of pull this together with this science background. I love that you have the history background too, because I think we, whether consciously or not, right, when you're looking at something versus someone who hasn't looked at history, You're able to pull, even if you don't necessarily consciously think about it, pull from what have people done before and what have people— right? Because we definitely have things that we see, we're like, oh, that looks amazing, that looks really awesome in history. And then we also look at other architecture and go, probably never do that again. That's not good. So being able to pull that and then pair that with experimentation.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I see how this creates a very powerful tool for you guys to be able to go, okay, well, yeah, we designed it and then we tested it and then we're able to really see what that impact is. And I wanna dive a little bit because you mentioned, and I love this as well, you mentioned thinking about the whole, right? Not just, yes, you obviously want the person who's going to be there, right? at this second, enjoying it and getting the most benefit, but you're looking at that social good and impact through the whole process. So what to you, when you both are looking at that, what does that whole process mean? Is that creating it, maintaining? Like, how do you envision the whole process?

Yeah, yeah, that's a big question. I think It's taken us some time, I think, as a company and even as individuals to understand what our overall goals are to be able to modify that process to work within it. So like I said, creating a sense of belonging is something that's really important to us. So if we know that that is a value, you know, to us as a company, we can bring that to the outcome of the product, like you mentioned, like people that work or live in the spaces that we design, but that we can also bring that to the interactions that we have with our collaborators and our clients. So one of the other values that we have is seek to understand. So that means that we always enter every conversation with a client, with a collaborator, with a consultant, with our users to ask really important and deep questions and not come into the conversation expecting that we have all the answers. So that's good. Kind of an ambiguous way of answering your question, but We're trying to better understand how we can create value of not just the product, but the whole experience. And I think another really great example is our physical studio. You know, you think of an office as a place where people have to work. And that's, of course, what we need to achieve through our physical studio and our environment. But it was always a goal of Stanley and I when we first started Mason to own our own space, you know, at around the 10-year mark of our company, if we were still around then.

Yeah.

And 2 years ago when we were hitting our anniversary of 10 years was in the middle of the pandemic. And we were very fortunate to kind of have this confluence of circumstances that really propelled us to bring that original goal and vision to life. So we did purchase a building and went through an extensive renovation. And last September we opened our new physical home and our studio for our team. In creating this studio, you know, it would be straightforward to say this is an office for an interior design firm, so we need XYZ in the space. But in order to really try to imbue a sense of experimentation through our physical studio, what we've done is really opened up the space and think about it as a cultural hub. So yes, this is a home for our design team, but it's also a gallery space where we welcome collaborations with affiliates, companies or organizations or certain individuals that we feel aligned with that we want to promote and give them an opportunity to showcase their work or use for other events. We have a library that we have compiled over the last year or so that is a kind of a dynamic space for people to contribute to and to take from, and it's open to the community at any time. It's also a great place for our team to work because It's a little bit quiet and introspective, almost like the stacks of a library space.

Awesome.

And then we have like a double-height atrium space that we're always creating a physical exhibition within. So this is a space where our team can get their hands dirty, build something so that collaborators and friends and colleagues that come always are seeing something new and different that sort of is a testing ground for new construction techniques, new materials, and then also new spatial organization so that people can feel different in space. So I guess this physical space as Mason Studios Home is sort of a manifestation of that experimentation as process value, where yes, the output of what's coming out of our doors and out of our inboxes is interior designs for clients, but the way that we're operating it is a little bit different to really Yeah, I love that idea and I love that it's, you're allowing the community to be in it and see it, right?

You're not just, because I feel like a lot of times, especially big design firms, like they wall off. They're like, oh yeah, we're, unless you work here, you'll never see anything. We're touching remotely, right?

Mm-hmm.

So that's, that's crazy. You're, you're able to take these values that you have and you're able to really build it into your company and how you're showing up in your process. And it isn't just, oh, we, you know, we design social good for other people and, you know, most positive impact, but like we also work in cubicles in a dark hole in order to do that. So I love that you're, you guys are embodied like, yeah, you do that for your clients. You're, you're able to create those amazing spaces, but you're also going, yeah, and we also do that for our our own team and our own business and we're actually doing those things. So we're living and breathing it. And I would imagine that makes you even more effective because you're not disassociated from, you know, you're not just doing it for other people. You're able to have your team go, oh, I'm actually, I'm working in this space and they can be, they're part of creating that space or having input even. And they're able to see that rather than just, you know, I feel like especially with digital design, it's easy to get this very isolated, like I'm sitting over here in my computer and then you're gonna go exist in or around whatever I designed and I'm never in it in some way. So I think it's, you've done an amazing, amazing job and I'm surprised more people haven't thought of this other than it's just like kind of the way it's always been, I guess. I mean, because it seems so logical now that you've like laid it out. You're like, oh, this, of course, like this produces better design and better, better process. So it's kind of, I don't know, maybe you, you probably have some thoughts on, on why or how, how it's kind of not been done before.

Yeah, it's interesting because when you think of the design industry as a whole, you know, there's lots of different sectors in design. And a term that we all use is that we're collaborative, right? You know, design often isn't done in a vacuum. There's so much influence. And interiors and, you know, creating experiences and spaces is so multidisciplinary. You know, we have to understand lighting, we have to understand color, sound, We have to understand, you know, HVAC and the technical requirements around building technologies, furniture, upholstery. Like, there's so many layers to what we need to know, you know, let alone just the fundamental principles, elements of design overall. And so collaboration is something that all designers are a part of, but I think how we define that is different for everybody and different for every business. Some, some businesses' collaboration is a little bit more digital or more kind of linear. Um, and what we have found is, you know, we're not just doing this, you know, to, to put things out there. We're doing this really to be selfish for ourselves.

Mm-hmm.

Because the more, the more we learn and get inspiration from our community, from other affiliate disciplines, the more it really fuels us. So we love working with artists, giving them a platform, you know, a space that they can use, present their work, and in turn we get to know them, we get to know their networks. And similarly, other committees. I mean, we, we are a sponsor of the DesignTO Festival, which is an incredible festival that's been running for over 10 years across the city. And when we created our studio, we made a partnership with them that we are also their home base. So they run their offices out of this studio as well. And, you know, that's, you know, a great thing that we can offer them that opportunity. But now we are, you know, being able to interact with the DesignTO Festival on a weekly basis and, you know, be flies on the wall and hear about everything that's going on in the arts and culture scene across our city. So I think the more that, yes, it's great that we have the opportunity to go beyond the, you you know, the client-based work and really use this space as an opportunity for that. It's really so benefited— benefiting us and our design team. You know, we as interior designers, we have to be on the pulse of new craftspeople, new materials, you know, new furniture, new lighting, new technologies, which are always changing.

Right.

And so working in a silo, you know, is not going to keep us learning and keep us growing. So having that, that revolving door, I guess you can say, and trying to get as many people through our door and, you know, really just growing off of the energy of the city and hopefully beyond as we continue to establish ourselves here is really our goal.

Hey, it's Ian here. So glad you're enjoying this episode of Conscious Design. If you want the full scoop on Conscious Design, what it is, how we do it, how you can do it, Then check out our book. We wrote it so creative entrepreneurs like you can code social and environmental responsibility right into your brand's DNA. You can download the first chapter for free. Link is in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. Yeah, that's, that's such a good point. And it's, you know, we, I think a lot of people, they talk about siloing, you know, internal inside of a company like, oh, the engineers are over here and the designers are over here and, you know, marketing's over here, right? But we also, and you're bringing it up, like we also kind of silo ourselves, you know, company to company. And even like you're saying, like design, we all, even in product design, there's so many different areas and we have to, when you're designing something on a big scale, as most often you end up being part of at some point, it's you, if you are not connected with those other areas, You're not gonna design as well. You're not gonna have as many good ideas. And it's always, it's always been, and I try to always build interdisciplinary teams whenever I can because it's always, you know, you'll have, you'll work on a project, you have somebody from a different background that'll just throw out an idea and it's someone and you're like, oh yeah, that actually works really well. Would never have thought of that.

Absolutely.

thought about that because, you know, you sit there and when you design toys or you design interior design, you know, you could be a hospital ER room designer for your entire life, right? You get really hyperfocused and you don't— it's great, great as one idea and one perspective. But yeah, you don't have it. You need more.

Right.

And the more you get, the more interesting ideas you have where it's like, Somebody in the automotive world has an idea and it, you know, never would have thought about it, but then you apply it somehow to interior design. You're like, and now we have something nobody's combined ever, ever before. And you're able to really come up with some interesting— I would love to be a fly on the wall and see some of the cross-conversations that happen when you're able to create.

Yeah.

Um, a model like that? Because that's— I actually haven't— I haven't heard or seen of any really good versions of that. So I might, might have to come out to Toronto and visit.

We'd love to have you. Um, I think there's definitely something to be said for specialists, you know, for people who can really focus in on their services. You know, there's really some advantages to that. Um, but I think for us You know, we have struggled with but stayed steadfast to being multi-sector. So as a portfolio base, we do a multitude of types of spaces. So we are working on multi-unit residential design. We are working on hotels and hospitality, restaurant spaces, retail spaces, single-family homes, even small-scale kind of pop-up shops. We did a juice bar cart for a market once.

Yeah.

There was really nothing too small or too large. We work locally here in Toronto. We work nationally around the country. We're even working out in Shenzhen, China and Shanghai to— so that we are trying to build our business where it's around the ideas that we bring rather than the specialty of a certain sector. And of course, there's complications in that, you know, and trying to get our message across. But we, we fundamentally feel as though that the design process is boundless in terms of it being applied to, um, to different scales and different locales or different places. Um, and so it's really just about ongoing learning, you know, as you mentioned, just absorbing as much as we can and applying it to all these things. Um, something that we're trying to do a little bit more of in the studio that we hope to be a bigger part of our future is actual fabrication with our Okay. I don't know if I'm going to digress the conversation here, but a story around the origins of Mason Studio as our name. Obviously, coming up with any name of a company is extremely difficult. It's like naming a child, you know, it's going to last for an incredibly long time and everybody has their affiliations with it. But You know, Mason Studio was founded on the idea of masonry, you know, the built environment, you know, the foundations of a house or of a built structure. Stanley's father and my grandfather were both immigrants to Canada, and they were both stonemasons. You know, they worked with their hands with stone and masonry.

That's awesome.

And on the personal side, you know, all of the, the people in our lives, both of our parents and our grandparents, were very influential to sort of give us that work ethic, you know, to, to be rigorous and, and, uh, do well in the world. But Mason Studio is an attribute to that where, as interior designers, we often just issue paper.

Yeah.

There are ideas and designs that are drawings that somebody else has to execute. I mean, yes, we are facilitators, we're coordinators, you know, we're there throughout the whole process, but we don't actually physically build anything. We're— we rely on and gain the expertise from the craftspeople that build our work. So, you know, Mason Studio and its title is sort of an homage to those that take our ideas and actually make it a reality. But what we want to be doing more of in our studio is more fabrication. So, you know, there's— we got a 3D printer this year, we got a sewing machine. When we were building our studio, we were physically, you know, creating special finishes on the wall, building light fixtures and installations. you know, we often work with craftspeople, but we hire, you know, designers who often have varied backgrounds and lots of hobbies and experience. And, you know, people often find their way to design in a different way, and they bring so much passion and experience and, and other interests. So we wanted to keep getting our hands dirty and using new tools and techniques and technologies to physically build and create more with our clients and with their spaces. So we do do that on our more self-initiated projects, you know, our installations and exhibitions that we're kind of physically building and ideating with that are more generated from our internal team. But as we move forward, we're doing that more and more for our clients, you know, restaurant projects, doing, you know, beautiful murals or creating more more dynamic and more emotive lighting stories, lighting narratives, as we further understand the importance of, you know, lighting to impact the interior spaces. So that's something that we're continuing to evolve into and that we're expanding on in our physical space to have the tools and technologies to experiment with that a bit more so.

I love that idea because it's my, my degree and background is industrial design. And so it's very, it's very hands-on. Like you go to shop class and like you're very much like, oh yeah, you're gonna draw it and you're gonna go make it. And I think that that really helps in that design process because you're actually touching everything. You really understand what you're building and you have to get familiar with different materials because you're gonna cut it, you're gonna, you know, form it, shape it, whatever it is, right? So you're, You get that experience. And yeah, that's something that interior designers don't— I don't as much. I never saw them in the shop. It was all just the industrial designers. We had interior— we went to college with interior designers. But yeah, that's a— I love that idea because you're able to pull in some of that tangible. Okay. Yeah, you're gonna have someone make, you know, You don't have to become a master at sewing, but if you know and really understand, then you're gonna have probably more appreciation, but then also know what you can do and what you're actually asking someone to do when you're, when you're like, no, sew it like this and make, make this patterns and stuff. You know what you're actually asking rather than just, you know, it looks good on the drawing. I may just make it. Make it happen somehow. So that, that's great. That's a very unique approach, but I love it because you'll be able to do more and show more too. Like, you'll be able to— I'd imagine you could. I don't know how you prototype in interior designs as much, but that could be— that would be an interesting option, right? Of being able to actually kind of see and feel and touch more before you commit to an entire room, right? And go, go all in on a hotel, seeing it more and, and having that tactile response to it. Um, yes, that is great. That is, that's exciting.

And I think another great opportunity with having some of these tools and, um, being able to create things in our studio is that it offers us ways to engage with other craftspeople and other artists to sort of offer our space or our tools, you know, to them and the greater community. So we've held workshops, you know, in our studio too, where we'll have a guest woodworker, you know, come in and do a little workshop. We did a workshop with children earlier in the year.

That's awesome.

And families, because we're, we're always trying to engage, um, a community of people that may not understand or be associated with, quote, you know, design or interior design. So thinking about children, you know—

I love that.

Inviting them to a space like this, like, this is a space that might be different from, you know, the day-to-day of a younger child or a family, and having a little workshop to show how materials come together and having something to walk away with. Um, so I guess an example of how you know, those tech tools and technologies aren't just for ourselves and for our, you know, design team to fuel the project work, but how we can again continue to use our space as a cultural hub to invite the community in, to engage with other craftspeople, to continue to learn with and for one another, but then to strengthen the community and kind of democratize design a little bit. We're very aware that our studio can, or any design studio, can sometimes feel very precious, you know, and intimidating to walk into.

Right.

And we want to try as much as we can to sort of break down those barriers and offer a space that is very welcoming, that's very inclusive, that has a little bit of something for everybody at different times of the year. So we do, we are kind of working on programs within the studio that are activities and, you know, workshops, so that those can be driven by people that are approaching us as well, you know, who see our studio and see the opportunity and say, like, you know, hey, can I host this event here? Or, you know, and then our team can get that energy and dynamicism from them. So, so yeah, there's— it's all cross-pollination, I guess, in our office.

That's awesome. I love it. I'm excited to see how that grows and hopefully other people start to pick up on this because I love the idea of a design— it's more like a community design hub where, yeah, you do real work, but you also have all these interactions and ability for art and design. And although you're doing classes too, like, it just really, really expands the space into being more valuable and more really to, to your goal of having a positive impact and social good. Like, you can do that. The more people you impact positively, the more you're able to, to really accomplish that goal of yours.

Yeah. And I think the one of the biggest, um, most satisfying things that come out of these collaborations and of the studio is when we see the progression from a self-initiated event or, you know, a collaboration that we do internally then translate into client-based work. You know, so for instance, if we host an artist event here and it's an up-and-coming artist or somebody that we feel is deserving of our contribution of our space, you know, for their work or for their, for their initiative. And then perhaps we have a client come in for a presentation the following day, and we're, you know, talking about interior design in their building. You know, there's often crossover that happens there where, you know, perhaps that artist or that exhibition that we're creating ends up finding its way into a client-driven project. And so we also see how our connections and, you know, developers that we're working with business owners that we're working with, they want to find, you know, great people to be collaborating with too. So the more that we can be this internal network where, you know, everyone wants to do well in the world and make, you know, positive contributions. So if somebody is, you know, looking for furniture for their restaurant and we can say, you know, if you buy this furniture, you know, it's supporting this and it's made here and You know, these materials are, you know, sustainable or a better selection than these ones. If we can kind of be that educator, of course our clients want that information too. So I think the most satisfying thing is when the— when our practice isn't divided into 2, you know, we're doing interior design for this team and we're doing self-initiated fun stuff in our studio for this side, but really how they interact. And so they can fuel off one another, and, you know, everybody, everybody wins. So we, we really hope that our studio will just continue to grow with that culture, with that community hub, more interactions, more people, more events, more collaboration, so that it's not forced. It just becomes a natural place where these connections and this symbiosis happens. And, you know, there's a couple of projects that working on right now where we're designing incredible interior installations, you know, spaces that are really emotive and really immersive. And they have been because of friends and collaborators coming to see our exhibitions and getting inspired by it and saying, you know, we want that in our space, in our restaurant, in our hotel, in our condo lobby. So it's not mutually exclusive, which is really exciting.

That's awesome. That's awesome that people are seeing it and they're loving it and going, hey, can we make this for us too? I mean, that's, that is definitely winning. You're doing, you, you are, are doing it right. People are seeing it and they're seeing the value, which I think is great because, right, they can come to your place and they can see it and they can be in it and experience it. And that, I think sometimes we have, we really have to experience those things and go, oh, I experienced, yes, I want more of that, and I want to give that to other people. And then you're like, yeah, do it in my, do it in my lobby, make it, make it like this, which is great. That is so awesome that you guys are able to do that.

Yeah, it's, it's a lot of fun too, because I think what we try to do in our studio too is have installations and exhibitions that are just quick, You know, we sometimes we develop them and actually build them within a couple of days or a week. So it also shows, you know, the design doesn't have to be expensive to create a space that really has impact, can come together quickly. Right now in our front gallery space, which is the entrance to our studio, we have a 20-foot wide and 6-foot long reflecting pool. So it's, it's sort of the thing that most people wouldn't expect when they first walk in the door to see, you know, a big body of water in someone's front foyer. But, you know, why not? It's, it, it's covered in wood chips around it. So you have this really sensorial experience of it absorbing the sound. You can smell the cedar. You see the water moving and the flowers and the lily pads floating on the water surface. And it came together in less than in a couple of days. Um, but it has a lot of impact, right? So I think it's things like that that show our clients that, you know, it takes ideas, it takes a little bit of bravery, but, um, we can do a lot, you know, with, with a little. And, um, everyone's up for that. So it's a fun playing ground here.

Awesome. That's, that's amazing. I'm, I'm excited to see you guys grow and, and hopefully see more of these. And so I hope you do lots of these for people around the world and see, get them more popular. That would be great.

Yeah.

Well, it's been, this has been great. I love your guys' process. I love what you guys are building. It's great to see someone taking interior design, you know, the agency model we all know and kind of giving it I don't know, it's not tipping it on its head maybe, but putting it at a 45-degree angle and trying, trying this new direction that no one, no one else is. I've never seen anybody do anything similar. And so it's great that you guys are doing it and is getting well received. Like you have people loving what you're doing enough to ask you to go do it for them, which is, which is great.

That's great.

other people are seeing the value there as well. Kind of to wrap up, I know you mentioned a few things, but is there anything else that you guys are looking, you know, looking into the future a little bit? Things that you're— I know you're going towards how can we make some more things in our studio and add that. Is there anything else where you guys are looking at a little, well, we want to add or play with right now that you can talk about in terms of where you guys see in the future of your teenager stage company? Really, we all, when you get there, it's definitely a teenager stage, still figuring things out, but you're not rock solid, you're not stuck in your ways yet.

Yeah, I mean, we've gone through a lot of growth and a lot of change over the last few years. I think everyone can likely say that coming out of the pandemic, but us probably even more so, you know, moving into a new space and doing a full renovation and now really being settled in. So I think what we really look forward to is living this vision and the opportunities of the collaborations that we have ahead of us. So this fall we have Making Art, Making Change, a collaboration that we're working on for our gallery. The next one coming coming in, in a couple of months. So just more connections like that where we can connect with organizations, people, companies who are doing great things, and we, we would support them and in turn, you know, learn more about how we can make an impact through the, the tools that we have, which is interior design. And then we're always looking for collaborators, people who are building spaces and places who want to bring on interior designers or other disciplines who have a like-minded approach, you know, to, to think differently and, and make, make an impact through the work that we do. So we're always looking to be diverse, you know, looking for collaborations with developers, restaurateurs, people opening retail spaces, people opening offices. But we know nothing is sector-specific.

Right.

The way that we're working is flexible, the way that we're using hospitality spaces are flexible. So it's also really exciting to think about how interior spaces are really changing because the way that we're living and working and entertaining has changed so much. So yeah, what's on the horizon for MASON is just really to kind of expand on and live in this cultural hub and continue to connect with clients and collaborators who see the world as an optimistic place in the future and want to kind of do our best to make, make it the best future that it could— can be.

Amazing. Well, yeah, this is— I, I love this conversation. It's been great to learn more about the backstory of how you got here. And yes, I, I'm excited to see where you keep going with everything that you're doing. Yeah, uh, for everyone listening, what's the best way to find you guys, be able to work with you, or, or just learn more about the unique things you're doing?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, our website and social media profiles are a great place to find us. So Mason Studio on Instagram and masonstudio.com, our, our website. We are always using Instagram in particular to talk about the projects going on or events. And you can sign up to our newsletter through our website. We'll be sending out any invitations to events that are going on. And we'll, we keep tabs that way through collaboration. So yeah, hope to hear from you.

Awesome. And we'll, we'll have that in the show notes for everyone. So again, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. This has been fun.

I really appreciate the opportunity to share about our work and process. So thanks for the invitation. It was great chatting with you. Thank you.