Designing DREAMS

Fairmont Peace Shanghai. Siam Kempinski Bangkok. The Westin Jakarta. Waldorf Astoria Shanghai. Four Seasons Singapore. The names read like a bucket list of places to visit on your next vacation. So, what do these luxury resorts have in common? The woman behind their design.

- MELINDA MURPHY

Not many people have their dream job, but PAULA O’CALLAGHAN really does. She’s a senior associate at Hirsch Bedner Associates (HBA), the top firm in the world for designing hotels and resorts.

“I remember one night, I was on a commuter train in Tokyo. I’d started reading interior design magazines on the train and I saw a huge spread on HBA – it was a big article about one of the hotels they’d done. I was so impressed, I decided right then and there that I wanted to work for that company; this was the type of design I wanted to do.”

From fashion to interiors

Paula didn’t always want to be an interior designer. In fact, she thought she was going to be a fashion designer, but one summer at the Parsons School of Design in New York convinced her otherwise. She instead got a degree in Studio Art from the University of California (Santa Barbara), but she really didn’t know what to do with it. With an Irish-American father and a Japanese mother, Paula grew up as a third-culture kid, living all over the world: Okinawa, California, Brazil, Scotland, and a boarding school (TASIS) in England.

“My high school advisor had been a curator at The Met. She asked me if I’d ever thought about interior design, but I dismissed it. I thought all interior design was Laura Ashley.” Who could blame her? It was the late 80s and Laura Ashley was everywhere.

But when she saw the spread in the magazine years later, her advisor’s words came back to her, so she signed up for a correspondence course at the New York School of Design. It was 1990 – the days before the internet – and she took the classes while teaching English in Japan. She told the man she’d eventually marry, Mike, that she wanted to be an interior designer and work for HBA. Paula had a goal.

Savannah