WATG, legally Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo, is a hospitality and destination design firm that began in Honolulu in 1945 and has worked on more than 700 destinations across 170 countries. It has been employee-owned since 2014 and is led by chief executive David Moore. The practice covers advisory, master planning, architecture and landscape architecture, with interiors delivered under the Wimberly Interiors brand and food and beverage work under Wimberly F&B. WATG was the architect on the restoration of the Hotel del Coronado in California, a National Historic Landmark and one of the largest surviving wooden Victorian resort structures in the United States, where a Blackstone-funded program of more than $550 million wrapped in June 2025. The firm moved its Southern California headquarters from Irvine to Tustin in 2023 and keeps additional U.S. offices in Honolulu, New York, Dallas and Atlantic City.
Eight decades of the practice are laid out as a dated timeline on the firm’s own site, and it reads as a map of where luxury tourism went. Wimberly and Cook formed in Honolulu in 1945; the first hospitality commission arrived the following year, a renovation of the Royal Hawaiian in Waikiki. George Whisenand, Jerry Allison, Greg Tong and Don Goo joined in 1971 to make Wimberly Whisenand Allison Tong & Goo, shortened to the present name in 1988. Asia opened up in 1978 with the Shangri-La Garden Wing in Singapore, and in 1979 Tanjong Jara in Malaysia took an Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Las Vegas followed in 1999 with the Venetian, The Mansion at MGM Grand and the Palace Tower at Caesars Palace, and Emirates Palace opened in Abu Dhabi in 2005.
The California thread starts in 1981 in Newport Beach, the first mainland office, with Costa Mesa, Irvine and Marina del Rey studios following. Those were consolidated into a single Irvine location in 2006 before the 2023 move to Flight at Tustin, a campus built specifically for creative firms with a food hall, conference center and indoor and outdoor meeting and fitness space. The Tustin studio is at 1730 Flight Way, Suite 150, under managing director Monica Cuervo, and it also houses several of WATG’s global functional leaders: Juan De Anda as chief financial and operations officer, Julie Martin as chief legal officer and Sandra Whipp as chief talent officer, alongside architecture principals Mark Yoshizaki, Dan Patton and Rafael Velazquez and studio director Xin Li.
Five service lines carry the work: Advisory, Master Planning, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and interiors under Wimberly Interiors, which was branded in 2011 with its own New York office. Advisory is research-led, covering tourism research, market segmentation, strategic positioning and feasibility analysis before a concept is drawn. Landscape work begins with a study of a site’s biodiversity and cultural heritage, with low-carbon and low-water design and regeneration of indigenous species treated as standard strategies rather than add-ons.
Hotels and resorts are only part of the portfolio. The firm also designs for gaming, branded residential, senior living and mixed-use markets. Recent growth has been additive: a full-service Shanghai office in 2018 after more than forty years working in China, a Dallas studio in 2024 serving the eastern and sunbelt regions plus Central and South America, and the 2024 acquisition of SOSH Architects. Contact for the Tustin office is tustin@watg.com, +1 (949) 574-8500.
