When Hally Stief and Heidi Sharkey had small children, the women would drag them to estate sales with the promise of lunch at Chuck E. Cheese if they were well behaved. “Stop crying or you can’t see the rat,” they’d threaten, keeping an eye out for just the right lampshade, pottery jug, etching, or chiffonier.

For over 15 years, the pair has found and fabricated items for interior designers, as well as creating their own designs. Now they have formalized their enterprise into a company, Mason and Martindale Creative.

Hally Stief and Heidi Sharkey have hunted treasures together for 15 years. Photo courtesy of Hally Stief — Hally Stief and Heidi Sharkey have hunted treasures together for 15 years. *Photo courtesy of Hally Stief*

Stief and Sharkey met at a playgroup for their children. Stief was designing small projects — wedding flowers, for example — while Sharkey, who had studied costume design at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, was working for the Barnes Foundation. “Heidi learned that I could sew,” Stief recalls. “I helped her hem ball gowns for a production at the Philadelphia Ballet.”

Pretty soon, they were hunting for antiques together, storing distinctive objects in space they acquired in the Brandywine Antiques Market in Chadds Ford. “Recently, we went to an auction and brought home a 4½-foot heavy carved whale that had hung in the storefront of a tackle shop in Maine,” Stief says. The whale is for a client in New York City — if it fits in her elevator. “Our residential interior design projects are spread geographically from Greenville, Delaware, to Swarthmore, to Cape Cod,” says Stief, who lives in Swarthmore. “Nothing like a road trip!”

They don’t have an office, instead working out of Sharkey’s Willistown studio and a local friend’s garage. “It’s amazing how much paperwork I accomplish sitting in the car,” Stief reports. “The seat is comfortable, and there’s music, and it’s always the right temperature.”

Sharkey used to design store windows in San Francisco and paint scenery on Broadway. Stief calls her partner’s aesthetic “contemporary and edgy.” She herself majored in history and gravitates toward Early American furniture. She loves textile design and visiting Wilmington’s Winterthur Museum. “The more dust, the better,” she says.

Last summer, Mason and Martindale decorated the bar at the now-open Village Vine bistro in Swarthmore by decoupaging old copies of the Swarthmorean. “The town loves it,” says bistro co-owner Jill Gaieski. “It’s exactly the kind of thing that makes us authentically local.”

Stief recalls that Gaieski and her partner, Lori Knauer, wanted a hometown feel. The designers acquired the Swarthmore Co-op’s original sign and chose a bright color scheme to make the space festive and welcoming. “I’m not the easiest client,” Gaieski reports. “They were not put off by that one bit.”

Why incorporate as a company after working together informally for so many years?

“The Devon Horse Show contracted us to decorate their Press Room,” Stief explains. “When it was time to write an invoice for the project, we needed a name for our business. On the spot, we put our maiden names together: Mason and Martindale. Sounded good. We have the same initials — HMS — and we decided that was as good a sign as any. That it was time to make it official.”

Learn more about Mason and Martindale, or find them on Etsy.