Arizona-born, Manhattan-based AD100 designer Amy Lau has died, according to a post shared by designer Brian J. McCarthy and others on Instagram. Known for her warm, visually arresting interiors, her work represented an effortless synergy between art and design.
Courtesy of Amy Lau
Growing up in the desert town of Paradise Valley, Lau's appreciation for the beauty and possibilities of nature began in her childhood, when she rode horses, spent time outdoors in the arroyo landscape, and discovered shells and stones with her grandmother, an artist and mineralogist collected. This also applies to Lau's appreciation for art – her parents were collectors of works by the Taos Society of Artists, jewelry and regional material culture. After studying art history at the University of Arizona, Lau traveled through Mexico with arts and crafts dealer Dino Alfaro, purchasing handmade works for his gallery in Tucson, Arizona, and then went to New York City to pursue a master's degree in fine and decorative arts the Sotheby's Institute of Art. She deepened her specialist knowledge through positions as director at both Thomas O'Brien's design shop Aero and at the former Lin-Weinberg Gallery, which specialized in mid-century furniture Collectible design throughout history. In 2001, she founded her own interior design studio, then known as Forms of Design, now Amy Lau Design.
In her commercial and residential spaces, the latter of which comprised the majority of her career projects, Lau was distinguished by her use of bold colors encouraged by the saturated hues of the American Southwest – “I still think of its dusty olives, sienna and… “Rust brown as 'my colors,'” she wrote in her debut monograph Expressive modernity (Monacelli Press, 2011) – and her disregard for others' superfluous distinctions between fine art and groundbreaking design. Many of her clients were, of course, collectors, including Clarissa and Edgar Bronfman Jr., Craig Robins and the artist Barbara Gross, whose homes she transformed into elegant homes total work of artTotal works of art, where “each piece in a setting plays a supporting role in that space,” as she said ADVERTISEMENT in 2022, having debuted on the annual AD100 list four years earlier. In these residences, custom-made, antique and 20th-century furniture sits alongside works of art to create expressive vignettes that dialogue with one another through color, texture or material.
