For Arteriors Home founder, business and pleasure cross paths
Get Mark Moussa talking about his business, Arteriors Home, and it’s hard to resist a smile. He’s surely one of the few CEOs in history to sport a shaggy, surfer-boy haircut and just-back-from-the-beach tan, talk animatedly about recent Paris flea-market finds, or refer to his job as “my gig.”
Then again, Arteriors isn’t your typical company. Walk into any Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn, indie home boutique or impeccably chic friend’s well-decorated home, and you’ll likely come across a lamp, side table or unusual objet created by the 21-year-old Dallas-based business. At the In Detail showroom at Dallas’s World Trade Center, Arteriors merchandise fills a space the size of a ballroom, and the 108-page spring catalog shows but a fraction of the company’s 1,200 available items. There are Venetian-inspired lamps in milky aqua and lemon yellow. Pedestals made from tree roots. Gold-leaf side tables. Silver sunburst mirrors. Bronze pendants. Baroque chandeliers.
Indeed, if there’s a design trend Moussa and team have overlooked, we couldn’t find it.
Though Moussa is happy to share hot-sellers – nature motifs, shades of gray, metallics – to talk business is ultimately to talk family. His Cairo-born father, Stanley Moussa, came to the States to attend the University of Oklahoma, but while studying for a chemical engineering degree, began importing trinkets from a relative and soon had a business on his hands.
When Mark was growing up and a student at Jesuit College Prep, it wasn’t unusual to find him in his father’s warehouse, wiring lamps. “I learned the business from my dad,” says Moussa, still lean and boyish at 49.
That hands-on experience, coupled with a business degree from SMU, paid off. Moussa founded Arteriors in 1987 with his brother George (George was bought out three years later). The name – a blend of art and interiors – is now trademarked.
