WL Robert Ledingham Memorial Award for an Emerging Interior Designer 2023

Featured by Western Living | Article by Stacey McLachlan

The winning team behind this year’s Robert Ledingham Memorial Award is small but mighty.

Like with the end of Lost in Translation, we may never know what specific words were exchanged between Nicole Varga and Trish Knight that made them realize just what they meant to each other. But over dinner in New York five years ago, something clicked into place for the interior design colleagues.

“I remember Trish looking across the table at me and saying, ‘I can see us being friends for a really long time,’” says Varga. “It melted my heart.”

They’d been working together at Varga’s previous firm, their friendship and mutual respect deepening with every project. “There are certain people you can spend every single day with. Nicole is one of them. She’s family,” says Knight. And so, in 2019, the two took the plunge, opening a Vancouver-based studio of their very own: Knight Varga Interiors.