Designers of the Year 2020: Introducing our Interior Design Judges

Here we are, just 10 days out from the deadline for Western Living’s Designers of the Year Awards. Life as we know it right now is a bit upside down€”we’re all in our socially distanced spaces, hoping to flatten the curve, doing everything we can.

And yet, beautiful design endures. We welcome entrants to this year’s Designers of the Year Awards, the winners of which will be celebrated this fall. Deadline is April 1€”for the chance to put your work in front of these top interior designers, our judging panel for Interior Designer of the Year 2020.

Credit: Paul Melo Photography

Alda Pereira, Alda Pereira Design

Alda Pereira Design is a Vancouver based interior design firm specializing in private residential projects and multi-unit developments including towers, townhouses, low rise developments and marketing centres. The Alda Pereira Design portfolio features an extensive number of versatile projects throughout North America, from inspired elegant urban residences to casual weekend retreats, a wide range of creative retail, restaurant, hotel and corporate interiors featuring signature clean modern lines and natural materials.

Alda Pereira Design offers an intelligent, comprehensive approach to the design process as means to satisfy the client's needs and requirements. Services are tailored to each project to ensure form meets function in an efficient, creative, and timeless expression. Services offered include programming, concept development, innovative space planning, contract documents, project management, site administration, furniture, fixture and equipment specifications, custom furniture design, and custom millwork design.

David Nicolay, Evoke International Design

David is a founding partner and principal of Evoke International Design Inc., a multi-disciplinary design firm established in 2000. A Master of Architecture graduate at Dalhousie University, he co-founded Evoke International Design Inc. to incorporate conceptual thinking, spatial design, and graphic design to ensure consistent and coherent branded environments for its clients. These multi-disciplines manifest themselves through their work for creative and corporate office design; restaurant and entertainment design; retail design; and custom modern single-family residence design.

Further, David is co-owner of the Cascade Company, a restaurant group in Vancouver that includes three restaurants and a brewery. David's current professional affiliations are as Registered Interior Designer with the ARIDO and IDIBC, Intern Architect with the AIBC and Associate member with the IIDA.

Michelle Biggar, Office of McFarlane Biggar

Michelle has been practicing interior design for over 20 years. With projects in Canada, Australia and the UK, her work embraces an extensive range of project types, ranging from hands-on crafting of small projects, to project management and design leadership of large-scale, complex, multi-user facilities. These include retail and hospitality projects, academic projects, galleries and museums, transportation projects, multi-residential, as well as commercial and municipal offices. She enjoys creating spaces that are regionally relevant and responsive to client ambitions, underscored by the timelessness of quiet and elegant restraint in form and materials.

Michelle is passionate about all facets of design. She practices a holistic approach, in which all elements of the project are well-considered and thoughtfully integrated, from the architecture, landscape design and interior design, to the branding, identity and wayfinding, to the furniture, art and accessories.