Margo Grant Walsh

Margo Grant Walsh is an American interior designer also known as a collector of silver serving pieces. As a designer of workplaces, first for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and later for Gensler, her clients included companies such as Goldman Sachs, Pennzoil, and Shearman & Sterling. Grant was inducted into the Interior Design magazine Hall of Fame in 1987,

Early life and education Marjolaine (Margo) Grant Walsh was born in 1936 to Alfred and Ann Grant on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Fort Peck, Montana. Her father was a Chippewa, and her mother of Scottish origin. Yermakov recruited her to work at SOM. While there, she worked closely with Davis Allen, then head of SOM interior architecture and design. One of their notable collaborative projects was the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel Hawaii. Walsh spent thirteen years at SOM in San Francisco, eventually becoming associate director of interior design. Initially the firm's partners were hesitant to pursue interiors design and architecture projects as a separate practice and only sought to do such work in buildings designed by SOM. Walsh is credited with convincing them to more aggressively market their interiors studio. When she first spoke with Art Gensler, the firm, which eventually became the largest interiors firm in the world, only had three employees. She became Director of Interior Design in their Houston office with a staff of 35. In 1979 she opened Gensler's New York City offices, where she was promoted to managing principal of the eastern region division. Later, she opened offices in Washington D.C. and Boston, as well as London in 1988. Before leaving Gensler in 2004, Ms. Walsh became one of four on the board of directors, and the company had grown to a staff of nearly 2,000 by the time of her departure. With over 800 pieces, it includes silverware, serving dishes, trays, jewelry objets de vertu from the United States, England, Mexico, and Europe. It is one of the largest such collections in private hands in the world. Walsh's "Collecting by Design" exhibition displayed over 450 pieces in 40 showcases and has been featured in 11 museum exhibitions since 2002, in locations from New York to San Francisco.