Architect Designs a Shift in Focus to Orange County

Thomas R. Pagliuso admits that he was not a model student, at least not in the three Los Angeles high schools that kicked him out.

But he acquired a taste for architecture while in the Army, persuaded a USC dean to let him enroll in college despite his unscholarly record and became a model entrepreneur.

Now, after designing resort hotels built throughout the Pacific Rim from his Honolulu office for 18 years, Pagliuso is ready to move the headquarters of his Media Five design firm and the core of his award-winning staff to the Costa Mesa quarters he opened a year ago.

“Our focus is going to be here,” the 54-year-old architect said. “We wanted a West Coast office, and we decided to come here because of the county’s potential growth and my familiarity with the area.”

He said the firm is “monitoring the coast for resort hotel projects” but conceded that few properties are available. Even so, a mainland office is a better place than Hawaii to generate projects in the United States and Europe. Media Five, for instance, is bidding on a business hotel project in Milan.

Already, the fresh, clean look of his design work--typified by the “interior architecture” in the Susan Marie women’s designer clothing store operated by his wife in South Coast Plaza--has caught the eye of South Coast owner C.J. Segerstrom & Sons.

So impressed were Segerstrom executives with his work that they added Pagliuso to the four-member committee that reviews design changes in the mall. He is the only non-Segerstrom employee on the panel.

“He does very progressive architecture, and he has a flair for detail,” said Robert Fernandez, Segerstrom’s in-house architectural coordinator. “Of all the architects we’ve known--more than two dozen of them since the mall opened in 1967--he’s one of the best.”

The opening of Media Five’s branch office in Costa Mesa almost turned into a bust last year. The local office was working on plans for a medical clinic in Thousand Oaks, but the project collapsed when the client sold the land.

To keep them busy, Pagliuso had to assign his California designers to help the 75-member Honolulu office with the renovation and expansion of a Maui hotel.

Now the 15-member Costa Mesa staff--which soon will grow to 28--is upgrading the entrances to South Coast Plaza for Segerstrom and is working on an exterior design for Birraporetti’s restaurant, a month-old mall tenant.

And the firm is one of two finalists in a Segerstrom competition to renovate the 15-year-old Mesa Verde Center, a small shopping mall at Harbor Boulevard and Adams Avenue in Costa Mesa. Fernandez said Segerstrom will award the contract early next year.

Such projects may seem minuscule for an architect who crafted such creations as the soon-to-be-built 500-room Seoul Regent Hotel in South Korea and 422-room Cabo San Lucas Hotel in Mexico, and the completed 300-room Regent Fiji Hotel on the island of Fiji and the 200-room Sheraton Breakwater Hotel and Casino in Townsville, Australia.

But Pagliuso views the smaller projects as a way to service his major clients. And service, he said, is an important but often overlooked aspect that leads to repeat business.

“You never have a perfect set of prints,” he said. “So we watch the budget and the quality of the work, and we go back six months later to go through the project with the client to correct any problems.”

In fact, his views on service led him to form Media Five in 1972 as a company that integrates the work that five separate companies would normally be hired to do. His firm does the initial planning on a project, prepares the architectural drawings, handles interior design and space planning, creates graphic designs and provides multimedia marketing services for advertising and promotions.

“There were very few companies doing this in the early 1970s, so that gave us an advantage. Builders would have to hire each of the companies separately and hope that they could coordinate their work,” Pagliuso said.

“Now more architectural firms are doing interiors and graphics, but sometimes not with the trained interior designers and graphic designers you need. We already went through all that.”

The firm’s unusual capabilities bring in contracts for other kinds of work than just designing new hotels and buildings. Media Five, for instance, renovates many stores, restaurants and other structures. Because those jobs drastically alter both the inside and the outside of existing structures, Pagliuso prefers to call the work interior architecture.

It’s the kind of work that sometimes makes shoppers think they’re walking down a street peering in store windows when they’re actually inside a shopping mall--the effect he created at his wife’s apparel store at South Coast Plaza.

Media Five also turns out annual reports and other publications for corporate clients.

A career in architecture never crossed Pagliuso’s mind until he was drafted into the Army in 1953.

“I don’t know why, but somewhere I got the idea I wanted to be an architect,” he said. “When I got out of the Army, I applied at USC, but a gal in admissions chuckled. She said the school was turning down ‘A’ students.”

But a personal appeal to a dean helped get him into USC on a conditional basis. Moonlighting at an architectural firm during his schooling gave him a jump on his career: While most of his classmates had to accept apprenticeship jobs after graduating in 1961, Pagliuso opened a firm in Palos Verdes with an associate from his moonlighting days.

One of the firm’s early projects was an apartment-sports club complex at the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach.

In 1968, Pagliuso opened a Honolulu office. Four years later, he bought it from his partners in an amicable parting of the ways. “My partners wanted to close the office, but I didn’t,” he said.

The office grew while state, national and international awards rolled in for projects Pagliuso handled in Hawaii, Australia, Japan and other Pacific Rim countries.

Meanwhile, the ownership of Media Five became dispersed as more architects were accepted as partners. Pagliuso and two others own the largest block, which amounts to 22%, he said.

Among the firm’s regular clientele are Regent International in Hong Kong, which owns the Beverly Wilshire Hotel; Seibu Corp. and Tokyu Co., both in Tokyo; and Rosewood Corp., a Dallas company that owns the Hana Ranch Hotel.

Sometimes, the different cultures in distant lands have led to altercations.

While redesigning the Vanuatu Tokyu Hotel on the South Pacific island of Vanuatu, “the natives got a little restless, and one of the workers bit the ear off an Australian manager,” Pagliuso said.

Media Five also has an office and a staff of 130 in Southport, Australia, near the famed Surfers Paradise beach. The office works only on Australian projects, he said. The number of personnel will be surpassed by the Costa Mesa office within a few years.

Work isn’t slowing down in the Pacific Rim, he said, but Media Five has stopped marketing its services in Asia, preferring to concentrate on the half dozen or so Asian clients it has and to start anew on the mainland.

“In a way, I guess I also decided it was time to come home,” Pagliuso said.