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Virginie Martocq, '91 - at TFS from 1983 to 1991 Virginie first came to Toronto French School in 1983, in Grade 5. As a little girl recently arrived from France, TFS was the one place where she felt linguistically and culturally at ease in this new country. By Grade 7, Virginie was already confident that with the help of the staff, and a few ESL classes, she would soon be completely integrated into her new country. Within a couple of years, she had completely mastered English (having only learned from Sesame Street, there were a few gaps in her writing skills). By Level III, Virginie was writing Britain’s English O-Level. The French Baccalaureate and French A-Level followed in Level IV, and it was this discipline that laid the groundwork for Virginie's later accomplishments. Virginie left TFS in Level V to finish her OACs at the Lycée in Cambridge. Upon graduation, Virginie followed the path of another TFS alumna, her older sister Laurence, to McGill University in Montreal, to pursue a degree in Art History. She left Montreal in the winter of 1993 to go to New York City. She volunteered at the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, interned at Mirabella Magazine and spent a year at Columbia University. In the summer of 1994, Virginie went to Venice to work as an intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. In 1995, Virginie returned to Montreal to finish her BA. After leaving university, Virginie took her first corporate job in sports marketing, at International Management Group. While the world of athlete representation was new and interesting to her, her heart was not in it. It was in the fall of 1996, when Virginie began taking part-time classes in design at Ryerson that she began to see the possibilities of making a living working in a creative field. She went back to school full-time at the International Academy in Design in Toronto to study Interior Design. She graduated in 2000 with high honors and many achievement awards. Virginie immediately went into business, under the name Martocq Designs. In addition to residential interior design, she did a lot of work with television's HGTV, for shows like Home to Go and This Small Space and also began working with magazines like Canadian House & Home, Style at Home and Chatelaine. Virginie soon realized she loved the world of publishing, and in February of 2004, took a full-time job as a Design Editor for Canadian House & Home. Virginie recently moved to Chatelaine as its new Home Editor. “Being responsible at Chatelaine for the development and production of the home section is somewhat daunting, but also exhilarating,” says Virginie. “We are in the midst of revitalizing this historical magazine, and it is so exciting to be part of a dynamic and creative team. “I have always maintained that I never worked as hard as I did in high school, preparing for O levels, A levels and the International Baccalaureate. I know now that the discipline and work ethic that I developed at TFS prepared me for the challenges that lay ahead of me.”
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