Photo: Trevor Nichols
Carla Bond-Fisher and the team from her Kelowna office.
As a child, Carla Bond-Fisher would map out her bedroom on pieces of graph paper.
By Grade 4, she had already researched and selected the program she intended to study when she finished high school.
For whatever reason, she says, she always felt like design was her calling, so the fact that she ended up running a design studio isn’t that surprising.
Although maybe it’s a little surprising.
Architecture, after all, is still a fairly male-dominated field—and back when Bond-Fisher got into it, that was even more true.
When she graduated from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in 1986, with a diploma in Architectural Technology, she says she was one of just three women in her graduating class of 100.
Entering a male-dominated field as a women is never easy, but she worked hard, and in 1995 took the plunge and started her own small business, drawing on her architectural experience to create attractive spaces for her clients.
But even though Bond-Fisher would eventually grow Stick + Stones Design Group to the design studio powerhouse it is today, at the time she was just looking to get by.
“It was never my intention to have a business with this, so it took a lot of the pressure off,” she said with a laugh. “I think my few goals were to just make some money for myself—I was newly married, I was young and living in Canmore—and I was in the right place at the right time.”
Whatever her humble goals were initially, over the past two decades Bond-Fisher has built Sticks + Stones into a thriving brand, with offices in Canmore, Calgary and Kelowna.
“I now have 16 employees, a lot of them are women, and we’re rocking it,” she says.
Last august, Sticks and Stones was named one of the top 11 best-designed offices in Canada. Along with the Tommie awards the office has accrued over the years, in April Bond-Fisher was given the prestigious Top in Technology Award by the Applied Science Technologists and Technicians of BC.
Those accolades were well earned. As well as running three offices, as she was building her Bond-Fisher was also raising three kids. She says that, on the day she gave birth to her youngest, she worked right up until 5 p.m.
“I would say as a woman, having to raise three kids at home and then grow a business, you have to be a little bit crazy,” she says.
These days, Bond-Fisher spends most of her time growing her business and mentoring her young employees.
While she doesn’t take on a lot of hands-on projects anymore, she says she gets her “creative fulfilment in the expansion and the idea of staying cutting edge, and what’s next.”
“What I’m seeing now in trends are things that I either did at the very beginning of my career, or I spent part of my career removing them from homes,” she says. “I feel like I’ve gone full circle, and had a full life cycle of design, and feel quite satisfied.”
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