From Fine Art to Outdoor Artistry: Meet Margaret Curtis Landscape Design
Landscape designer Margaret Curtis, featured in House & Home, shares her creative path and new chapter at Owen Sound’s Harmony Centre.
by Lorraine Campbell, reprinted with permission from Harmony Centre
One of the newest residents at Harmony Centre is Margaret Curtis. Her business, Margaret Curtis Landscape Design, was formerly based out of Meaford, but after welcoming her baby a few months ago, she decided the time was right to move the office to Owen Sound to be closer to home.
She and her husband share studio space (Jesse is the founder of the local magazine Rrampt), and the arrangement is ideal for both of them.
Margaret has taken an interesting and expansive route to landscape design. She studied fine art at university, and that led to a career in floral design in Toronto, which led to work in film as a set director, and then to starting her first business, as a food stylist for TV and print (her childhood dream was to be a chef).
An Unexpected Evolution
She loved floral design, working on weddings and big events, but she sought something more challenging, something on a bigger scale.
Margaret headed back to school to study landscape design and was hired by a well-respected designer in Toronto, Joel Loblaw Inc. After graduating, she remained with his firm for five more years and continued to hone her skills. Although her evolution as a landscape designer is unexpected, the path to reach this point has been logical and has given her the skills to utilize all her experiences in her design work.
After spending ten years in Toronto, Margaret was ready to head closer to her childhood home. She settled back in Owen Sound and established her business in Meaford, where she developed contacts with local architects and builders.
She found a niche for her skills, mainly in the Muskoka-Collingwood-Thornbury-Meaford areas. She works independently and occasionally calls upon a freelance artist to help with some of the computer-generated renderings that she uses.
Margaret takes her responsibility as designer very seriously: “Landscaping is a luxury, and people are putting a lot of faith and trust in me,” she says.
“I want to make sure that people love their outdoor spaces and [that the spaces] are going to function well for them and their families. The designing is about creating something that is beautiful now but will also look beautiful in 15 years’ time.”
Design a Lifelong Interest
Margaret measures success in terms of her client’s happiness, and also in terms of pushing herself to be a growing and creative person. I asked her what it is that makes her good at her job.
“I’m a good listener,” Margaret explains. “My clients might not know exactly what they want, so I have to suss out through our conversations what would be most appealing to them. As well, I have been interested in design for a very long time, since I was a little kid,” she adds. “It’s been a lifelong interest of mine.”
Check out Margaret’s designs on her website at margaretcurtisdesign.com, reach her at hello@margaretcurtisdesign.com, or pick up a copy of this summer’s July/August edition of House and Home, where her designs are displayed on the cover of the magazine.
Profiles is a series of articles by Harmony Centre board member Lorraine Campbell. Each month Lorraine writes about the people and the community groups that make this remarkable facility what it is today.
Thank you to sponsors of The Owen Sound Current Writers’ Fund, who make these community contributions possible. Contributions from the community do not necessarily reflect the opinions or beliefs of The Owen Sound Current and its editor or publisher.