Amy Lau, a New York interior designer and founder of the annual design Miami Fair, is a saturated colour of the American Southwest, and her in-depth knowledge of modernist objects is the basis of her work, January 17th died in Scottsdale. Aliz. She was 56 years old.
The cause was cancer, her family said.
Lau's success didn't depend on her ability to analyze paint colours and match furniture and rugs (though she could, of course, do both). Rather, it was her perfect talent for choosing important pieces. For example, the sofa designed by Vladimir Kagan, the sculptures of Anish Kapoor, and the bronze work by furniture sculptor Cyrus Seander – and creates warm and impressive interiors around it. These choices were not an afterthought, but a candidate presence.
“The designers all started from a perspective, and Amy was knowledge of mid-century modernity,” said Amandanisbett, an interior designer in New York and Palm Beach, in an interview. “However, she is also a true advocate for today's artists and craftsmen, and she searched for work in works she thought were worthy of her clients' money.”
These clients included media executive and Seagram heir Edgar Bronfman Jr. and his wife, Clarissa. Fashion designer Ellie Tarhari (Lau designed the East Hampton Boutique). Real Estate Developer Craig Robbins.
Lau teamed up in 2005 and teamed up with designer Umbramedda to launch Design Miami, a collector's design fair that is thought to run parallel to the annual Art Fair Art Basel Miami Beach. I did. It has become an important showcase and destination for designers and their clients.
“Amy was the first of a new generation of designers to enter the industry at the end of the 20th century,” New York interior designer Vicente Wolf said in an interview. “She was not restrained in the sense that she wasn't going to do things like everyone else is doing things in the use of furniture and colour.”
He added, “She used firecrackers and made her hair colour suit that.”
Wolf was not the only colleague to mention Lau's impressive red hair. By chance, it is a shade that often appears in her interior.
As Nisbett said, “Amy embodied the aesthetics of her design.”
Amy Marie Lau was born on December 12, 1968 in Scottsdale, Arizona to the eldest of four children and grew up in nearby Paradise Valley. Her father, Frederick Lau, dentist and her mother, Patty (Cochran) Lau, who managed the house, was an avid collector of Southwest arts and artifacts. Her paternal grandmother, Ruth Lau, was a painter of the Arizona desert scene. Another relative was the founder of the Taos School, the early 20th century art movement of Palette. Yellow, coral, apricots, tanning, and yes, the red of the southwestern landscape informs Lau's interior.
“I still consider those dusty olives, Sienna and Rusty Brown to be 'my colours',” she wrote in her first monograph, Expressive Modern (2011).
After earning a bachelor's degree in art history from the University of Arizona in 1992 and a master's degree in fines and decoration arts from Sotheby's Art Institute in Manhattan in 1995, Lau became manager of Aero, New York Design Gallery and Boutiques. It's become. . She later became design director for the Lynn Weinberg Gallery in Soho.
“Amy's aesthetic vision was shaped in our gallery,” said one of its owners, Larry Weinberg. “Choosing fabrics for room-like vignettes, window displays, and upholstered pieces. These are all core skills of interior designers, and Amy was all excellent.”
In 2001, Lau founded Amy Lau Design, which was created easily to create residential and commercial spaces that filter different styles, objects and client preferences through the lens of modernism. Over the next few years she began designing heath ceramic products. Caller; S. Harris, supplier of high-end fabrics. Maya Romanov is a manufacturer of handmade wall coverings.
This fall, Lau opened a gallery at the New York Design Center. “A long-standing dream,” said Sharon Bray, business manager at Amy Laudesign. Modern and vintage glass, ceramics and metalwork share the space with textiles and furniture.
Lau was survived by his parents and siblings Megan Huckverse, Katty Travel and Matthew Lau.
Perennial tenant Lau bought an Alwyn Court one-bedroom apartment in west Midtown in 2018 and renovated it for the next six years. . She moved when the massive construction was completed, but the rest of the work continued around her.
Lau, who called the apartment her sanctuary, “We've put together a lot of contemporary, vintage pieces she loved from the artists and artisans she loved,” Bray said of the group, including Kagan. Michael Coffey, a woodworker. Eric Bruce is a designer and manufacturer of window treatments. Lau himself designed the wallpaper for the bedroom and foyer. The Art Nouveau Jugentil Chandelier she found in Europe was the focus of the house. (On Saturday, Architectural Digest posted features related to the apartment.)
“When the window treatments were finally installed this September — which meant that all the work was done — Amy was delighted,” Bray said.
As a client, her boss was “detail-oriented and strict,” she added. “She knew what she wanted.”
