Designer’s Cultural Surroundings Becomes a Family Business

Paula Wenstrom sees buildings, especially libraries, as ‘organic footprints’

Preston Hollow designer Paula Wenstrom’s mission to renovate and reimagine public spaces and workspaces has become a family affair. 

For 33 years her company Cultural Surroundings has been updating and reworking commercial spaces, home interiors, and home offices, though she has branched out more recently into new companies with her sons, Montgomery and Gavin McKenzie, both Highland Park High School graduates.

An urgent installation in south Texas necessitated Montgomery’s assistance, which led to him working with his mother daily to build the business. Talented in computer graphics, Gavin’s part-time work rendering products for the website during college led to full-time work in the companies. 

“My Unique Office is Montgomery’s,” Paula explained. “My Unique Closet, working with the same Portuguese manufacturer, is also more geared to e-commerce, where you can create your own desk or closet system via drag-and-drop. It will launch later this year.” 

Wenstrom moved to Texas with an interior design degree from the University of Illinois. Working retail, she found herself taking the reins of a library furniture business during its dissolution. Cultural Surroundings was born out of the company’s turnaround. 

“I was 24 and female, which was very abnormal,” she recalled.

Her design and renovation work includes public libraries in Dallas, Flower Mound, Farmer’s Branch, Grand Prairie, Garland, Arlington, Fort Worth, and the lauded new Frisco library. 

Past and current private school library projects include Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas, St. Mark’s School of Texas, and Ursuline Academy.

“In the U.S., we have so few public venues that are just open for people to go have the third space, as it’s called, for people to get outside of their home and go someplace and work, be on their computer, do a project, or just sit and think,” Paula noted. “Libraries are very much that now.”

Even some coffee brands – once viewed as similar places – have redesigned to be less comfortable so they can move people through, she added.

“To me, buildings have a very organic footprint,” she said. “If you sit in them or think of them as an empty space, there are very natural energy spots where it seems to make sense people would want to be. That’s how I lay out space. We mix a lot of contemporary with traditional space. We renovated several Carnegie libraries that have beautiful interior details that are very old. We mixed more contemporary furniture with that turn-of-the-century detailing. So, it’s very eclectic.”

Paula is planning her new brick-and-mortar business and wants to make it homey with “an old-world European café and retail space—no internet, no TVs, no loud music.” 

“It will be a place where you can congregate and actually have a conversation,” she said. “It is lifestyle in the way I want to promote people taking a moment to be good to themselves and getting to know the people they’re sitting across from.”