The Arizona-born, Manhattan-based AD100 designer Amy Lau has died, according to a post shared on Instagram by designer Brian J. McCarthy and others. Known for her warm, visually arresting interiors, her work represented an effortless synergy between art and design.
Courtesy of Amy Lau
Growing up in desert town of Paradise Valley, Lau’s appreciation for the beauty and possibilities of nature began in childhood, riding horses, spending time outside in the arroyo landscape, and gathering shells and rocks with her grandmother, an artist and mineralogist. So too did Lau’s eye for art—her parents being 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 decorative arts dealer Dino Alfaro buying artisan-made works for his Tucson, Arizona, gallery, then headed to New York City to complete a master’s degree in fine and decorative arts at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Stints as a director at both Thomas O’Brien’s design shop Aero and the former midcentury furniture-focused Lin-Weinberg Gallery sharpened her expertise on collectible design across history. In 2001, she founded her own interiors studio, then known as Forms of Design, now Amy Lau Design.
In her commercial and residential interiors, the latter of which formed the bulk of her career projects, Lau’s signatures were her embrace of bold color, encouraged by the saturated hues of the American Southwest—“I still think of its dusty olives, siennas, and rusty browns as ‘my colors,’” she wrote in her debut monograph Expressive Modern (Monacelli Press, 2011)—and her disregard for others’ superfluous distinctions between fine art and groundbreaking design. Many of her clients were, naturally, collectors, including Clarissa and Edgar Bronfman Jr., Craig Robins, and the artist Barbara Gross, whose homes she transformed into sophisticated gesamtkunstwerks, total works of art where “every piece in an environment has a supporting role to play within that space,” as she told AD in 2022, having debuted on the annual AD100 list four years prior. In these residences, custom, antique, and 20th-century furnishings form expressive vignettes alongside artworks, in conversation with each other through color, texture, or material.
