This Is Natalie, Design Director: Always Ask Why
Natalie laughs easily. It’s part of her warmth, and perhaps part of the reason she has built such a close relationship with her Bangkok team, despite leading them from Melbourne.
Based in Australia and working on hotels around the world, Natalie knows hers is a unique arrangement. “Not many people get to work from anywhere they want and travel every six weeks.”
Her path to BLINK has been similarly unconventional, shaped by chance encounters, curiosity and, as she puts it, a little luck.
“Lucky timing and lucky me!”
As Design Director, Natalie supports her team closely and is agile in moving between the broadest vision and the smallest detail. Working closely with Clint and her team, she strikes a balance within BLINK’s design direction, owners’ ambitions, and operators’ requirements.
It is often about communication and asking the right questions. Throughout her career, Natalie has learned the importance of explaining the thinking behind every design decision. It usually begins with one question. Why?
A career shaped by chance
Natalie was originally headed for science.
“I’m a straight science person, so physics, chemistry, maths. I was going to be a scientist.”
Natalie had always been able to sketch and think in three dimensions but hadn’t considered design as a career. That changed when a family friend, an interior designer, showed her around a warehouse she had renovated. Natalie discovered a discipline that brought together everything from furniture and finishes to structure, services and space.
A week of work experience at a workplace design practice confirmed it. She changed her university choices from science to interior design.
“It was a chance meeting. And inspiration.”
Hospitality arrived in much the same way. At a wedding in Bali, Natalie asked who had designed the hotels she was in awe of. That question led her to Kerry Hill Architects, where she began her hospitality design career in Singapore.
Years later, back in Melbourne and missing international hotel work, she saw BLINK advertising global opportunities on Instagram.
“I thought it might be me.”
Two weeks after conversations with Rengy and Clint, she had the role.
Design direction starts with people.
For Natalie, design direction begins with understanding people. Every project brings together different ambitions, priorities and perspectives, from the owner and operator to Clint and the wider BLINK team.
“It’s kind of like a jigsaw puzzle,” she says.
The challenge is finding where those pieces fit. And when budgets shift, or value engineering becomes necessary, understanding the thinking behind a decision makes it easier to know what can change and what needs protecting.
“Nothing about what we do is ad hoc.”
As Natalie puts it, “Protecting the integrity of the design is up to us.”
Remote, but never distant
Natalie leads her Bangkok team from Melbourne, travelling back roughly every six or seven weeks. She is very conscious that remote leadership takes effort, especially across cultures.
“You’re not sitting in the office with them,” she says. “I had to really make an effort to connect and stay connected.”
Alongside project calls and design reviews are WhatsApp messages, shared jokes, memes and meals together whenever she’s in Bangkok.
“At the start, I think they thought I might have been a bit odd.”
For Natalie, the informal moments matter.
“It’s about being approachable.”
Because beyond the design reviews, deadlines and day-to-day decisions, what matters to Natalie is creating a team that feels supported, challenged and able to keep learning.
Why do people choose what they choose?
Natalie says her “obsession with brands is enormous”, but the interest goes beyond aesthetics.
“I’m always intrigued by why people make decisions that they do. Why did they go to that hotel? Why do they choose that restaurant? Why do they choose that chair?”
For her, a brand succeeds when people feel aligned with it, when a space somehow feels like an extension of who they are.
That curiosity carries into the way she mentors. She asks designers why they chose a colour, material, chair or stone, not because she assumes the answer is wrong, but because she wants them to understand their own thinking.
“You have to really understand why you’re doing what you’re doing.”
Natalie knows the difference good guidance can make. Early in her own career, a mentor encouraged her to develop her skills and confidence. Now, she wants to offer that same support to the designers around her.
“I’m not a teacher. I’m a mentor. I lead through example in most cases.”
When 2D is not enough
Working on the design of a luxury resort in the Philippines, Natalie travelled regularly to factories in China alongside the owner, operator and members of the BLINK team, reviewing and refining the hotel’s furniture and lighting.
Drawings can confirm dimensions, but they cannot always reveal how a piece will feel, whether its proportions are right or how it will work in a space.
So, the team sat on furniture, touched materials, changed finishes and tested lighting. They even found themselves standing around fittings with sandwiches, putting lunch down when someone had another idea.
“It was always so collaborative and so open and inspirational.”
“We all cared long enough, we all shared enough meals together to understand that what we were doing was going to be special.”
What next?
Natalie already works with established international hospitality brands. She’s also excited by the potential to help shape something entirely new.
“What I’d love to work with is a luxury brand that’s in its infancy,” she says, something “a little bit risk-taking, a bit more curious, a little less known, a little bit more experimental.”
She imagines a hotel where luxury is expressed through experience as much as surroundings: creating something with chefs, making art, working with ceramics, then ending the day with a very good meal.
“Where can you go that’s very experience-driven and risk-taking and ever-changing and seasonal?”
It’s that same curiosity Natalie brings to her work and encourages in her team. A willingness to ask questions, challenge familiar thinking and remain open to what comes next.
For Natalie, there’s always more to learn and more to discover together.
This is Natalie. This Is Us.