Today we’d like to introduce you to Maike Cheng.
Maike, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
After graduating with a degree in Interior Design from the University of North Texas, I spent several years at a local hospitality design firm designing luxury boutique hotels and resorts around the world. I learned very quickly on the job and was told by the owner of the company that I did more in my first year at his firm than most people have done in 10 years. After being inspired working with great architects on various projects, I decided to study Architecture and moved to San Francisco for graduate school. While in Architecture school, I was advised by my instructors that I had more practical knowledge from my design experience than the school could ever offer me. With their advice, I said goodbye to San Francisco, packed up my apartment, and moved my doghter and myself back home.
Coming back to Dallas, I consulted on hospitality projects before taking a position with a multifamily design firm. The transition into multifamily was less scary than I had imagined because it was very similar to designing hotels, but with less bureaucracy and more focus on the end-user. After a bit of a learning curve, I was given the design director position within a year. At my peak, I was personally overseeing more than a dozen projects in all phases of the design process and traveling back and forth between Dallas, Austin, and Houston up to 4 days a week. As you can imagine, I burned out pretty quickly, and my health took a turn for the worse. In January of 2014, I resigned from my job to focus on my health. During that time, my brother and sister-in-law started their house search, and I decided to go back to school for my real estate license to help them. I also took a leap of faith and started ‘MC Collaborative Designs’ to focus on residential renovations and remodels. My goal was to someday become a one-stop-shop for all things design and real estate!
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Learning to run a business has been one of the biggest challenges and lessons of my life! In the company’s first two years, I had a few classmates from college and graduate school team up with me, and we put out proposals on over 50 projects and were awarded half, a mixture of various project scopes and sizes. We were super busy and flying by the seat of our pants while learning to put some resemblance of a system in place. Meanwhile, I was also growing my real estate business assisting clients with buying and selling properties and learning more about the Dallas-Fort Worth market.
Being a business owner has brought me so much joy and it has been so exciting to see how the business has evolved throughout the years. We are forever grateful for the clients that put their trust in us and for the friendships we have formed along the way. I thrive on the independence and could not imagine going back to working for a big firm! Learning to control my schedule is sometimes still a struggle as I am constantly juggling between Dallas and Seattle, design and real estate, volunteer work, and now our digital content!
We’d love to hear more about your business.
MC Collaborative Designs is a small boutique interior design and real estate studio based in Dallas and Seattle. We focus first on making spaces functional for our clients, then followed by the aesthetics of a room. We also collaborate with multiple designers throughout the DFW metroplex on various projects. One of our other brands under the MC Collaborative Designs umbrella is Abigail Dixon Styling, our staging company.
Because of our training in hospitality and multifamily, we take a very hands-on approach in helping our clients. We understand how scary a renovation can be and our design proposals are created so each step of the process (conceptualization, space planning, construction bidding, material selections, custom cabinetry design, furniture selections, etc.) is a separate phase of the project so clients can choose to stop anywhere along the journey based on their comfort level.
We also excel at helping clients who have Pinterest boards of ideas collected but have a hard time seeing through the design fog. There is so much design content on the internet these days, and sometimes it is difficult to sort through misinformation without the help of a design professional. We find that when you truly listen to a clients’ needs, goals, and objectives, their personal style of design usually becomes unmistakably clear. That is probably what sets us apart from other design firms. Where many firms are known for their “looks,” our projects do not necessarily have a consistent “look” because our first priority is to always make sure we solve the functional problem for our clients. We strive never to have to redo a project after five years because it’s no longer in trend.
Several clients who have previously worked with other designers often thank us for saving their money and preventing them from building an addition when all they needed was to rearrange their floor plan and utilize the dead spaces. We have the ability to see space differently and utilize every square inch. Because we are also immersed in the real estate world, we have a different insight into how we put together a clients’ budget and recommend designs that give clients an ultimate return on their investment.
Working in design and real estate, we have noticed an ever-growing income gap. As a result, we regularly volunteer throughout the Dallas metroplex focusing on education, improving quality of life, and ending homelessness. Giving back to the community is one of our pillars, and our clients love our dedication to the local community.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
We just celebrated our 6th anniversary earlier this month and have launched our latest project, ‘Debriefing Design.’ It is a YouTube series followed by a “behind the episode” podcast. We see more and more that consumers often watch home improvement shows on television and are confused by the misinformation they see between budget, timeframe, and scope of a project. ‘Debriefing Design’ was created to give consumers a behind the scenes look at the design process through the eyes of a design professional. The YouTube episode airs on the first Tuesday of every month. On the third Tuesday, we have a follow-up podcast that responds to viewer’s comments/feedback while diving into the design further and discussing related real estate topics. We created the series with the hope of empowering consumers, so they make educated decisions when it comes to design renovations or real estate. Please catch the series at www.debriefingdesign.co and check out the podcast at podcast.debriefingdesign.co! The podcast is also now syndicated onto all of the major podcast listening services. Down the road, we hope to open a retail component, either in brick-and-mortar or virtual format, then also get into real estate development.
Contact Info:
- Website: mccd.co
- Email: design@mccd.co
- Instagram: instagram.com/mccd.
co, instagram.com/ debriefingdesign - Facebook: facebook.com/mccd.co
- Other: debriefingdesign.co, podcast.debriefingdesign.co
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