Announcing the 2024 Western Living Design Icons

Our Western Living Designers of the Year awards issue is in full swing as we speak—we’re going through final proofs, packaging it up for the printer and gearing up for the big awards celebration on September 12!

We’re introducing a couple of additions to the awards program this year. Many of you cast your votes in our first annual Western Living People’s Choice Awards—the results of which will be announced live on stage at our giant awards party on September 12.

We also felt we were long overdue in celebrating those designers who have shaped the design scene in Western Canada: our very own hall of fame that highlights the designers whose influence has been immense, both on their fellow designers and architects, and on the entire design industry—from homeowners to contractors, design shops to magazines just like ours. 

We’ll be celebrating these two new inductees—our 2024 Western Living Design Icons—at our WL Designers of the Year Awards party on September 12 as well. If you don’t have tickets yet, now’s your chance—they’re selling fast! 

Our 2024 Western Living Design Icons are…

Alda Pereira

Alda Pereira was a rule-breaker from the start. She was fresh out of KPU’s interior design school back in 1987, and she opened her own business just as the country was heading into a recession. “The first rule they teach you is to never start a business straight out of design school,” she told us in 2010 when she won that year’s WL Interior Designer of the Year title, “and I broke that rule right away.” 

But Pereira immediately made an impact: her very first project, a small salon, won her gold from the Interior Designers Institute of British Columbia. And since then she’s covered everything from private homes to corporate head offices to becoming the go-to for multi-dwelling residences all over Vancouver (her name became so synonymous with excellent design that one developer named a building after her: the Alda).

She is, of course, still an in-demand designer in the city, and it’s easy to understand why. If you revisit the 2010 portfolio that secured her win, you’ll see work that could have easily been featured in a recent issue of this magazine. And, in fact, when we celebrated our 50th anniversary a few years ago, it was Pereira’s own home (which we ran in 2014) that was highlighted in the issue as one of our favourites of all time—itself an exercise in approachable modernism that you could imagine spending plenty of quality time in. “There’s a certain minimalistic sensuousness to what she creates,” says interior designer Kelly Deck. “She always strikes this balance of extreme restraint without sacrificing atmosphere.” 

Pereira has long had the gift of making each project extremely personal, too. “There’s an ease about Alda’s work—it doesn’t feel derivative,” notes interior designer Robert Bailey. “It just seems to flow very naturally—it really feels like it’s driven by the client, and the context in which she’s working.”

She may break the rules, but in doing so she has also become a standard-setter for beautiful design in Western Canada. It’s an aesthetic that many local young designers are aspiring to match—and an indelible imprint that will be helping to guide and inspire our interior design scene for generations to come.

Douglas Cridland

We try to use the word icon sparingly in this magazine, because it’s a term that only becomes true after long exposure to the rigours of time. One season’s “iconic” chandelier can be fodder for a “what were we thinking” column after only a few years of changing tastes. But we’ve been lucky here at Western Living to have had a front-row seat to 50-plus years of Douglas Cridland doing masterful interiors, so we feel uniquely qualified to humbly bestow the title upon him. We first featured one of his houses in March 1981, where, going for clean and functional, he installed restaurant shelving a solid 20 years before its widespread use in home kitchens. And so began a journey of him designing wildly imaginative spaces and us being privileged to publish them in these pages. And throughout all this time, the one constant has been that his genius for design is unwavering.

But for Cridland, the spaces themselves are only one part of his career: they’re bolstered by the people he and his work have touched over the decades. When this award was announced, letters singing his praises poured into our office. They came from clients (“He has a particular talent for creating interiors that transport a client to their future selves; meaning he sees who you are before you do and takes you there one fabric at a time!”), fellow designers and even contractors, who marvelled at his professionalism. We were particularly struck by the words from Cridland’s former colleagues, Samantha Smiddy and Lisa Stegman: “His influence on our personal and professional style is still felt in our everyday design decisions. Whether it be an interior architectural detail with a drapery pocket or the stitching on a custom ottoman, his teachings are now a part of us, the next generation of designers.” It all amounts to a body of work on which we can proudly put the moniker of icon.

Get your tickets to our 2024 Western Living Designers of the Year awards party here.