MAAD PROPERTIES
Marc & Adria established MAAD Properties after spending twenty plus years living in Australia, Taiwan, Bali, Singapore, Amsterdam and many other great locations around the globe. Both worked with some of the world’s most distinguished hospitality and luxury brands and, between them, they’ve travelled to hundreds of cities, far-flung locations and exotic destinations in over ninety different countries.
Marc Gerritsen
partner + principal designer
Adria W. Lake
partner + managing director
Marc has been a self-taught commercial and professional photographer, architect, interior, industrial and product designer since 1982. His multi-disciplinary talent is honed by his extensive experience as an image maker and designer. Trained at the Academy of Industrial Design in the Netherlands, Marc is a designer in the classic European sense, with an impressive tract record in furniture, art, jewelry, architecture, landscaping and industrial design.
Marc was a founding director of “Structure”, a Dutch-based interior design and building company which he managed successfully for many years before relocating to Australia. While continuing his architectural work in Australia, Marc established “AS IS”, a synthesis of his art and design experience. He has exhibited his work widely and sold hundreds of individually designed furniture. Marc is a founding member of Byron, Art, Space, Environment & Culture (BASEC).
In 2005 Marc moved to Taiwan and for the next 8 years he established himself as the country’s leading architecture and commercial photographer; published TAIWAN MOD and hundreds of his photos were featured in the region’s most respected design magazines and publications.
Marc has since focused his design skills and passions into MAAD’s property design and development in Europe, Asia, and the US.
Website: www.marcgerritsen.com
As a respected Wellness industry insider and an accomplished business leader, Adria pushes boundaries, bucks conventions, and breaks new grounds in all aspects of her work. For over two decades, she has stayed ahead of trends by adeptly recognizing patterns and keeping a vigilant eye on the future.
As the owner, founder and Managing Director of A.W. LAKE 360° Wellness Design, Adria works with the world’s foremost luxury hotel brands in conceptualizing and designing their award -winning wellness facilities.
Having managed her family’s hotel and real estate holdings, Adria combines her insight and expertise as a wellness expert with an owner’s perspective. Adria brings her insatiable curiosity, visionary approach and creative strategies into her projects. Her relentless pursuit of excellence, sharp eye for detail, and passion for innovation are the reasons her firm has garnered global recognition, won prestigious international awards, and a client list which includes the world’s leading and most distinguished brands such as Aman Resorts, Bvlgari, Four Seasons Hotels, Ritz Carlton, St. Regis, Waldorf Astoria, W Hotels, and countless others.
Adria speaks at major conferences around the world, writes for leading Design and Wellness magazines, travels extensively in search of new inspirations, studies various forms of traditional systems of medicines including African, Ayurvedic, Bon, Chinese, Tibetan, Tantric and Mayan.
Website: www.awlakedesign.com
“My work over the last few years as an architectural and interior photographer has taught me what NOT to do. Looking at all the incredibly fine detailed properties I photographed I thought: is all this glitter and luxury necessary? Is a flawless marble floor going to make my living experience so much better?
I want my design to be honest, playful, naked — as in not covered up or embellished. Luxury is not defined by your material choices, but by the way the space makes you feel, how it frees you and expands your mind“
— Marc Gerritsen
I spent more than twenty years designing and creating wellness spaces and concepts for some of the world’s best hotels and resorts.
I’ve travelled to hundreds of cities and exotic locations around the globe, worked with some of the most distinguished and recognized luxury brands, won awards and accolades for the work that I’ve done, and established my company as one of the best Wellness Design firms in the world.
Long before GOOP, VOGUE, and hundreds of celebrity gurus on YouTube and Instagram made ancient rituals and age-old wisdom trendy, I travelled the world to seek out masters, shamans and healers, lived with isolated tribes deep in the jungles of Amazon and Borneo and wondering nomads on the high plains of Tibet, studied long forgotten systems of traditional medicine, researched rare high altitude medicinal plants in Bhutan and throughout the Himalayas.
I would then translate the sacred knowledge and transport these ancient practices and mystical experiences to Paris, New York, Seychelles, Mauritius, Shanghai, and countless other urban sprawls and secluded tropical paradises for a few privileged, hard-core converts and wellness addicts who were only too willing to splash out thousands of dollars to be the first to try.
Wellness, in my world, has always been grand, opulent, splendid, sumptuous, and reserved for the fortunate few.
But all around the world, the wellness craze and movement grew, spread, and mushroomed, until it was everywhere. Now that Wellness has become “mainstream” and a behemoth valued at 4.5 Trillion dollars, I wonder what impact it has had on the global health and well-being. How has it changed us?
My quest is to understand what makes us human -- how we are wired and what makes us “well”. Not as a scholar, scientist, or a skeptic, but as a member of the species.
More importantly, and perhaps urgently, I wonder if our obsession with wellness has prepared us for a future of extremes where changes, disruptions, major transformations are happening faster, more abruptly, and unpredictably than at any other time in the past.
And, in this post- Covid world, I wonder what it would take to thrive in a world full of uncertainties. To not be fearful or feel threatened by things I cannot control. To stay the course when things don’t go as planned. And to not be deterred or defeated by things I cannot explain.
I invite you to join me and hope that you will find the journey rewarding and exhilarating.
-Adria W. Lake