Amy Lau, Beloved Designer of Joyful Interiors, Dies at 56

Lau was born and raised in Paradise Valley, Arizona, where childhood activities in the sun-soaked desert landscape—riding horses, attending Pueblo dances, gathering rocks with her mineralogist grandmother—instilled a lifelong affinity for natural colors and textures. Her parents, who collected paintings from the Taos Society of Artists, often took her to museums and galleries, honing her artful eye at an early age. That motivated her to study art history at the University of Arizona, where she flirted with the idea of becoming an archaeologist. 

She instead sojourned through Mexico with the dealer Dino Alfaro, who was seeking artisan-made objects for his now-closed Antigua de Mexico furniture store in Tucson. With newfound appreciation for the decorative arts, Lau headed to New York City to pursue a master’s degree in American fine and decorative art and design from Sotheby’s Institute of Art. “I thought it would equip me with the academic credentials I needed to pursue a life in design,” Lau once said, explaining how she crisscrossed the country to deconstruct furniture and authenticate canvases. “The more I studied, the greater my appetite was to learn more.” It was sated by stints at Thomas O’Brien’s design boutique Aero and the prestigious Lin-Weinberg Gallery, where she spent five years accumulating a formidable knowledge about 20th-century furniture and decorative objects under the historian Larry Weinberg.

These formative experiences coalesced when Lau launched her own interiors firm, Forms of Design, now known as Amy Lau Design, in 2001. She quickly became a beloved fixture within New York City’s close-knit design community for cultivating an atmosphere of fun and comfort within her unapologetically bold yet sophisticated interiors. Whether a glass-walled city apartment or a secluded Hamptons cottage, each of her residences brimmed with impeccably restored original pieces whose personality shone thanks to her sui generis curatorial eye. In one room, she deftly employed color schemes reflective of a property’s locale; in the next, one-of-a-kind textiles subtly nod to expressive vignettes nearby, elevating the home into artworks in and of themselves. Thirteen projects reflective of this alchemy starred in her first book, Expressive Modern (Monacelli Press, 2011), where she offered readers a wealth of tips on how to achieve her interiors’ signature spark.

Owing to her whimsical approach that jettisoned the barriers between art and design, many of Lau’s clients were high-profile collectors. One was Craig Robins, with whom she co-founded the first edition of Design Miami in 2005, when it was known as Design.05. Occurring alongside Art Basel in Miami, Basel, and now Paris, the fair has become one of the world’s premier venues for collecting, exhibiting, and discussing collectible design, propelling numerous up-and-coming designers and galleries onto the global stage. Perhaps it foreshadowed Lau’s distinction as the first interior designer invited to exhibit by Salon Art + Design, where she mounted a glamorous booth packed with one-of-a-kind treasures celebrating the beauty of Art Nouveau. Curated with luxe design objects emblematic of the French era’s naturalistic forms in a sumptuous palette of soft pinks and creams, the booth “feels nothing like a typical design show installation,” Galerie wrote at the time, likening it to one of her “ultra-chic living rooms.”

Beyond residential interiors, Lau channeled her curatorial acumen into opening an eponymous gallery in the New York Design Center this past September, capturing her joyful vision across a rarefied selection of furniture, lighting, décor, and art. In one vignette, a pair of bronze Adrian Pearsall lounge chairs upholstered in a sumptuous apricot velvet plays off George Vander Sluis paintings and sparkles behind vintage Nanny Still glass vases. She also designed products, having released patterned cowhide rugs and pillows for Kyle Bunting, colorful wool-and-silk rugs for Doris Leslie Blau, tie-dye wall coverings for Maya Romanoff, a vibrant fabric collection for S. Harris, and one-of-a-kind mosaic tiles for Heath Ceramics. 

The announcement of Lau’s passing inspired an outpouring of tributes on social media from collaborators, admirers, and designers whose careers she supported. “I had the privilege of creating a table for her, and she encouraged me to push my creativity while still delivering something functional,” wrote the artist and designer Fernando Mastrangelo. Glass designer Germans Ermics echoed that sentiment: “She was the first to notice my work in 2015,” he wrote. “She had a genuine passion for supporting young talent, and I’ll always be grateful for her encouragement.” Perhaps those who will remember Lau’s indelible impact the most, though, are the lucky inhabitants of her spaces. Clarissa Bronfman, who enlisted the designer to create an art-filled Hamptons weekend house that Galerie published in 2019, summed up Lau’s ethos nicely: “You have to have joy.”

For Lau, joy came from the simplest of places, even as her career accelerated. “Looking to nature is a retreat,” she told Galerie. “It softens the heart and makes us breathe, and I really want to embrace that.”