Margi Kaminski

Lauren

Margie, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so excited to learn more about your story and share it with everyone else. I've had such a wonderful time working with you, and I'm excited to share your vibe and your insights on all the things. So let's get started — what do you do?

Margi

What do I do? Oh my goodness, it's a long list. But the short form is: I'm an interior designer — have been my entire career — and now I'm the Health Practice Leader firm-wide for Cannon Design.

Lauren

And how did you get there?

Margi

It was a circuitous path and certainly not one I'd initially planned. I thought I had my whole career mapped out — and then life happened. After college, my husband and I started a family. I had two children back-to-back in two years, and I was trying to figure out how to have a career and a family at the same time. Back in the 80s, there wasn't much discussion about work-life balance, especially not in the interior design community. So I charted my own path and started my own firm so I could control my time — and I did that for 15 years.

I stumbled onto an emerging market called Senior Living, which was absolutely explosive going into the 90s and early 2000s. I needed to grow fast, so I connected with my biggest competitor and said, "Hey, what would you think about merging?" The long and short of it is, she came back and said, "What if I bought you out?" Honestly, that worked perfectly with my plans — I had four teenagers at the time, and I felt I needed to be more available to them.

After five years with Studio One Design, I took some time off. I thought I might be retired, but I now call that my four-year sabbatical. When my youngest entered college, that was my first day back in design — but design with the big firms. I was hired by RTKL in Chicago, was for about ten years, then landed at Cannon Design, where I've been for eight years. It's been wonderful.

Lauren

I love that. I have this visual of you and another woman in power suits over lunch — these women in the nineties making big moves, saying "I'm just going to buy you." That is such a power move. I love it.

Margi

It was a power move! And we're still friends today — I still get a handmade card from Julia every Christmas. It was a wonderful experience. It allowed me to have that work-life balance I desperately needed. I keep saying "time," but time is currency — it's precious, and you can't get it back. I was blessed with what I call my second career, and it's been very different working in the big firms.

Lauren

I've read that most people go through about four different careers, which I find both alarming and exciting. It speaks to the evolution of a career — you don't just have to pick one and stick with it forever. Life isn't linear, and neither is a career.

Margi

Exactly. You have to be open to the possibilities that present themselves. I never planned to be in the big firms — and yet it's been an amazing experience at two fantastic firms that are changing the world with the buildings they design. It's about being open, flexible, and resilient — now more so than ever.

Lauren

What problem would you say you solve?

Margi

I have to think about that for a minute, because there are so many. But I think the biggest one is this: I practice in a hyper-specialized modality of design — healthcare — and we are impacting human beings at the most vulnerable times in their lives. That is humbling. What we do can shape someone's entire experience. Experiential design has really come to the forefront, and it's about time — I've been thinking about it for about 20 years.

I'm an interior designer, but it's no longer about this static envelope of space. It's about the people in the space: what they are doing, and how what we create supports them. I'm really passionate about that.

Lauren

I love how eloquently you explain it. Most humans enter the world in a hospital setting, and some of those same humans leave through one too. It's such a life cycle. As a consumer, I've really enjoyed the new approaches — the biophilic designs, the trauma-informed spaces, the color. It is so impactful. It touches every human. What a wonderful way to spend your time.

Margi

It truly is. I share this with my colleagues — it's almost a sacred appointment, what we get to do. I know that when I tell people I'm an interior designer, they immediately think HGTV. That's not what I do. Healthcare design is highly technical and deeply aesthetic, but it isn't the same as residential or hospitality design. In no way does that diminish what we do. People who practice healthcare design have an incredible commitment and desire to leave a lasting legacy. I'll just stop there.

Lauren

Every time I venture out of the healthcare sector I find myself high-tailing it back. It has so much meaning and purpose. I have a question for you — feel free to answer in whatever capacity feels comfortable — what do you think we could do better to support women? Not just moms, but women.

Margi

That's a big topic. I think it comes back to time — we can't get it back, and we keep cutting into it. When younger people ask me what's different about practicing today versus 40 years ago, I've said this for a long time: it's the velocity and intensity by which we work. It is at a frenetic pace. The tools have changed, the markets have changed, but the velocity and intensity have grown exponentially to the point where you simply can't humanly keep up.

There's going to come a day of reckoning where all of us — women and men — have to take stock of what we're doing and how we're doing it. Think about the cortisol, the inflammation, the less sleep. We know all these things are bad for us, and yet we don't know how to stop.

Take email as an example. Before email, you'd open your mail and reply through the postal service. Then came FedEx. Now with email, people expect a response pretty quickly — you don't have a week like we used to. And what we're doing to ourselves and our bodies because of it — you have to take care of your health first and foremost, because out of that flows everything.

Lauren

I was just having this conversation last night about how we work late into the night, then wake up not feeling great, and what we produced wasn't great either. But we feel this continual need to produce and go. Then you pick up your kid and you punish yourself for taking time off. It's a vicious cycle. I've had extreme health challenges myself — my cortisol was off the charts. The only way I've managed my health was to step back from the corporate cycle of needing to be responsive all the time.

Margi

That's right. And if you are always doing, always producing, how do you ever have deep thinking? We're reacting instead of thinking. Especially in a creative field — to be creative, you sometimes need just that downtime to let ideas flow. For me, I love being in nature. I love taking walks, riding my bike, swimming. I do some of my best thinking when I'm unplugged in a natural setting that's conducive to flow and creativity. But I don't do it enough anymore — we're all just running very fast.

I try to be very intentional about not separating that activity from work. I include it in my work hours. If I have a big deadline, I go for a walk. I hike through the forest. I end up at the beach. And then I come back with ideas and energy, and I can work quickly. Rather than forcing myself to sit at a computer and be creative.

And the research is showing us that sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day is as bad as smoking a pack of cigarettes. That scares me. We are more sedentary today than ever.

Lauren

It's interesting — we know sitting and commuting are bad for us, but nobody seems to be in a hurry to fix it. Some of this is just cultural, so ingrained in our society.

Margi

You go to other places — Europe, Canada — and they have a healthier perspective on work-life balance. In the United States, productivity is our culture. And I think that's going to be a generational shift. But we also have to give ourselves some grace. It's only been a couple of years since we emerged from a worldwide pandemic. Sometimes my husband and I will say — can you believe we all went through this, the entire world, at the same time? And then it's so American of us to just jump right back out of it and be productive.

Lauren

It feels very much like — okay, but did we go to therapy for that? Or did we just pretend it didn't happen?

Margi

That is so true. I do a lot of behavioral health in my practice, and when I see the adolescents and children and what the pandemic has scarred them with in their precious few years on earth — it's so unfair. I don't know what we could have done better, because we couldn't plan for it and we were all doing the best we could. But we have a whole generation that has suffered greatly.

Lauren

We're coming up on time, so I'll move to our last question: if you could tell your younger self anything, what would it be?

Margi

Take your time. There is so much happening at any given moment, and you need to choose wisely. In order to do that, you need to take the time to think through and prioritize what's really most important to you — and then align what you're doing with that.

As a younger interior designer, I felt like I had these goal posts I had to hit. But who cares? All that planning gets interrupted by life and circumstances. So don't be so hard on yourself. Give yourself grace. And take the time to do what intuitively — you will know — is right.

Lauren

I love that. Almost every single woman I've interviewed has talked about tapping into their intuition. I wasn't expecting that to be a theme. We are such a data-driven society — and yet here we are.

Margi

There's a lot of good in being data-driven, but you've heard of analysis paralysis. There's actually a connection between your gut and your brain — this primal sense that can be just as effective in decision-making as all the data you think you need. And today, it's just never-ending.

Lauren

I was using ChatGPT yesterday to figure out if it was safe to drive to the mountains with flooding, and it gave me all this data — and then at the end it said, "Listen to your gut." I love that. Even technology is telling us to stop relying on data.

Margi

There's technology telling you to stop relying on technology! That's wonderful. Well, thank you so much Lauren. This has been so meaningful. I genuinely appreciate you reaching out — I think you are filling a gap that is sorely needed. The more we talk, the more we share. And the more we can show other people that they can take control of their own lives. That's what it's all about.

Lauren

Your impact is just going to keep echoing throughout the industry and the community. You might be putting your pencil down, but your impact continues.

Margi

Thank you, Lauren. I genuinely enjoyed this. I'm getting a little emotional — I'm just about a year away from retirement now, so it's been wonderful to look back. And I'm so glad you reached out.