LIKE many small businesses, Murdoch Design Services started in a spare room at home ? in this case, at Joan Murdoch's home in Paget. After 11 years with an architectural and interiors firm, she had decided it was time to spread her wings.

"You reach a point sometimes where you are ready for a change, " said Joan, speaking in the tranquillity of her offices in the Continental building on Church Street. "I saw an opportunity to be my own boss, and that appealed to me. I didn't have any expectations of building a huge company."

Mrs. Murdoch had specialised in commercial office interiors throughout her career, and she felt fortunate that she had a number of clients who were willing to work with her in what was then her new one-woman firm.

"It grew from there, and now I have been going for nine years," she said.

She drew a clear distinction between her firm's specialty, commercial interiors, and residential design work.

"With residential, I would say it's all about how it looks," Joan explained, "and with commercial, it's all about how it functions. If the client is a growing company, the way you space-plan it and design the various rooms and functions is important, because they need to have flexibility for growth. You need to ensure that you have planned for all of the internal systems and communications, and any special needs, like audio-visual systems that the client may want. It's more about making the office work than the aesthetics, although we always try to make the design as attractive as we can.

"Some of our clients have very definite ideas about what they like and don't like. Some like a very traditional look, with mouldings and period furniture, and some like a more contemporary glass-and-stainless steel design. You take a reading on what direction they are heading, and offer them a plan that sticks within their budget."

Having been in the business in Bermuda for 20 years, Mrs. Murdoch has a number of major commercial clients, and although she would be too modest to say so, the quality of her service is such that some 70 percent of her business is from "repeat" clients.

"I have worked with XL since they started, way back when their first office was in Victoria Hall, and also with Centre Solutions from when they were Centre Re," she said. "Most of our new business does come by word-of-mouth, sometimes from project managers, or contractors, or furniture dealers who have recommended us to clients."

Mrs. Murdoch's road to the opportunity to start her own company began in small-town Ontario and wound through Winnepeg and Calgary before life brought her to Bermuda exactly 20 years ago.

"From when I was young, I wanted to be an interior designer, and probably thought I would do residential work," Mrs. Murdoch said. "The idea of organising space appealed to me. If more people had been more progressive-minded when I was growing up, I might have been encouraged to go into architecture, but the reality, 30 years ago, was that it was harder for young women to be accepted in architecture."

(The "gender gap" is still all too apparent in the professions in Bermuda today. The Institute of Bermuda Architects lists 31 male and seven female registered architects, whereas the Professional and Associate members of the Bermuda Society of Interior Designers (BSID) number five males and 25 females.)

"I am from Ontario, but I attended the University of Manitoba at Winnepeg, and graduated with a Bachelor's in Interior Design, which was then the only such degree course in Canada," Joan reminisced. "I moved to Calgary, and got a job with a company that specialised in office interiors, and that's probably why I started out with commercial interiors, because that's where jobs were most plentiful at the time. That was the time of the oil boom in Calgary, in the late 1970s, and it was very prosperous for a time, but then, because of politics, it became a lot less prosperous, and that's when I moved on."

Joan responded to an advertisement from a Bermuda architectural firm, and arrived 20 years ago this month. At that time, before the "second wave" of international sector expansion, her first clients were mostly the banks and local companies.

"Slowly, we started to get into more international business, and when I left my last firm, we had a pretty busy interiors department there."

By the time Joan thought about branching out on her own, because of a love of recreational diving, she had met and married experienced diver and underwater photographer Ian Murdoch, and she felt fairly relaxed about her decision.

"I was young and foolish enough to think that starting out on my own wouldn't be a big problem! I started out working from home, and set up my drawing board in one of our spare rooms; this was before everyone used computers.

"After about six months of that, I got an office in town, because the commuting back and forward just got too much."

at Murdoch Design Services, Mrs. Murdoch is ably assisted by three professional colleagues, Bermudians Nancy de Souza and Tamisha Greene, and Canadian Enza Abate.

"Over the years, I have found that more and more young Bermudians call up or want to visit the office, "said Mrs. Murdoch, "because they want to find out more about the profession. The BSID is trying to encourage young Bermudians to get into the field, because there was once a disproportionate number of expats doing this work."

Asked to reflect on what had been the best and worst aspects of her decision to start up her own enterprise, Mrs. Murdoch gave a surprising answer.

"It's one and the same thing!" she said, laughing. "The best part is I get to make my own decisions, and the worst part is I to make my own decisions. I would like to have a partner, in that it would make the actual running of the business easier, and there would be two opinions instead of one.

"If I hire someone, I worry if there will be enough work in six months' time to keep everybody busy. There's always the worry about where the next job is coming from, which is a constant concern even when we're being run off our feet. With time, I have learned to handle the anxiety better, because I know I've been through it before."

The steady expansion of the international sector gives Joan room for optimism about the future of the business, and she feels fortunate to have the support of her three colleagues in design.

Nancy de Souza has been in the business for about eight years, and even in that relatively short time, the 33-year-old Bermudian, who graduated in Interior Design from Humber College in Toronto, has seen a number of changes.

"I studied overseas, but I have only worked here in Bermuda," she said. "I have worked with Joan for five years, and commercial work is the core of the profession here. There is the design phase, and the contract document phase, a number of phases in the whole process. It's not, as some may think, about picking out pretty colours!

"Unless you have been 20 years in the business," advised Nancy," if you are not on Autocad, which is a computerised drafting tool, you will not get a job as an interior designer. It is a steep learning curve, but all of the technical drafting is done on computer now, and the software is constantly being up-graded. In my last year at school, I had to do my final project on Autocad."

Facility with Autocad software is an effective requirement for architects, engineers and interior designers, and is now so ubiquitous that a drawing board is not to be found in the Murdoch office.

Nancy's colleague Tamisha Greene, 32, has also been working as an interior designer for eight years, since graduating with a Bachelor's in Fine Arts with a concentration in Interior Design from Atlanta College of Art. She was always attracted to the technical aspects of design.

"When I was in high school, I loved math, and I loved to draw, "said Ms Greene. "In my third year of high school, technical drawing was an elective, and I aced it! I really loved that, so I looked to do something which combined the technical and the artistic. With a focus on corporate clients, my principal clients have been XL and Belco, and they tend to be on-going projects, involving a lot of inter-departmental changes."

Enza Abate, a 30-year old Canadian, wanted to get experience with an international clientele, and she said that the beauty of Bermuda and the friendliness of the people has just been a considerable bonus.

"I studied interior design and graduated from Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario, and was working in Canada when I heard from a friend that there was an opening in Bermuda," Ms Abate said. "I came for a number of reasons, principally to get broader experience, and I have worked on some amazing projects here. I have been here over four years now, and I hope to be able to stay for some time to come."

Joan Murdoch's company will no doubt continue to thrive along with the international sector, but for Joan, it is not all work and no play. The Murdochs have a boat, and most weekends find them out diving, and many vacations find them underwater somewhere far away. A balanced life is just a matter of careful design.