By Pops Peterson
Photograph by Eric Limon

When I first met Patrick McBride at a party in Sheffield 17 years ago, he had that enviable combination that made you both admire and slightly resent him—soap opera star good looks, a successful lighting design business in New York, and the kind of prominent family background that opens doors before you even knock. He seemed like the golden boy with the script already written. How wrong I was about that script.

Back then, Patrick was deep into his lighting design world, running his own company and traveling globally for high-end events. Hovering in the background was Tillett Textiles, the legendary family business started by his grandparents D.D. and Leslie Tillett and embraced by iconic tastemakers including Jackie Kennedy, Bunny Mellon, Babe Paley, and Brooke Astor. Patrick seemed comfortably distanced from that legacy, carving his own creative path. Little did any of us know that tragedy would soon redirect his entire trajectory.

“My best friend was murdered,” Patrick tells me, his voice still carrying the weight of that loss. “My life changed—let’s say it was the first ‘what am I doing with myself’ moment.” At 32, faced with mortality’s brutal reminder, he sold his Brooklyn apartment, bought a house in Great Barrington, and returned to the family fold. “To be honest, I can say I was helping them, but really Tillett was helping me.”

What followed was a remarkable 15-year chapter where Patrick didn’t just join the family business—he transformed it. Working alongside his mother, Kathleen, after her divorce from his stepfather, Dek, Patrick took Tillett from a regional custom fabric maker to an international powerhouse shipping to six time zones. He created new collections, forged relationships with top designers, and turned the company into what he lovingly calls a “fabric emergency” service for the interior design world.

For a designer showhouse to benefit local nonprofit Construct, which provides affordable housing, Patrick designed a room using Tillett’s iconic Strawberry Fields pattern.

“The DNA of Tillett was custom,” he explains. “Not ‘in stock’—we were made to order and it was special.” Under his leadership, they doubled, then tripled their business, but success came with a price. His days stretched far beyond traditional hours—answering emails at 3 a.m. to accommodate Australian clients, managing seven employees, overseeing everything from Herman Miller’s Alexander Girard tapestries to bespoke fabrics for the world’s most discerning designers.

Then came the second pivot point: his mother’s dementia diagnosis. “I knew I couldn’t take care of her AND keep all that going,” he says. The man who had built an international textile empire made the hardest business decision of his life—he sold Tillett Textiles.

“Dementia is a wild roller coaster, to put it mildly,” Patrick says. “In the last four or five years, I will say that I have found the most incredible appreciation for our minds and also the deepest compassion and patience.”

During this time, Patrick has also tended to his own creativity, working on local projects such as the interior design of Mezze Guesthouse, the chic space above Williamstown’s renowned restaurant, and reimagining the Buttonball Inn (formerly The Egremont Village Inn). He is also launching two new ventures that may just be his most exciting yet. First is Fabric Lab, a members-only custom textile atelier that will serve high-end designers without the crushing international demands of his previous operation. He is also in collaboration with Bradford Louryk to create textiles and wallpapers using the iconic illustrations of a world-famous illustrator—he can’t reveal who it is quite yet. Patrick is thrilled, and looking forward to announcing this major coup soon.

The timing feels both poetic and painful—just as this dream project launches, he and his partner of 10 years broke up. “This is perhaps my third ‘what am I doing with my life’ kind of moment,” he says.

But if I’ve learned anything about Patrick McBride over these 17 years, it’s that his greatest strength lies not in having it all figured out, but in his extraordinary ability to reinvent when life tears up the script.

Pops Peterson is the owner of SEVEN salon.spa in Stockbridge and an award-winning artist.