Amy Lau passed away in January 2025 at the age of 56. The designer’s Manhattan apartment, completed just months before her woefully premature death, perfectly captures her incisive eye and her steadfast belief in the ennobling power of great design. It is the final grace note to a singular life spent in the pursuit of beauty and joy.
Surveying Amy Lau’s stellar home in New York’s historic Alwyn Court, one can’t help but lament the loss of one of the design world’s most original voices. Amy was a font of optimism and wonder, a champion of art and design placed in the service of a life well-lived. Her apartment brilliantly synthesizes the many threads of her storied career: her virtuosity in marshaling ideal scale, proportion, and shape; her fearless embrace of color as a mode of emotional expression; her refusal to draw artificial distinctions between fine art and fine design; and her drive to conjure interior worlds redolent of curiosity, connoisseurship, and pure delight.
Amy told AD that living in Alwyn Court had been a long-standing dream. “This building holds a special place in my heart. I’ve passed the landmark countless times over the course of my years in New York City, and I was always captivated by the intricate beauty of its ornate façade,” she said. Built between 1907 to 1909, the 12-story tower by architecture firm Harde and Short is easily recognizable for its elaborate terracotta decoration, which includes a crush of cherubs, crests, salamanders, scrolls, and vines. A block from Central Park, the Plaza Hotel, and 5th Avenue’s luxury shops, Alwyn Court quickly became one of the city’s most expensive addresses after it opened to its first residents. But to Amy, it represented far more than a reputation or a swanky address: It was an opportunity to create “a personal environment that tells my own story” within an icon of New York’s design history, she said.
By the time Amy acquired her roughly 950-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment, its original interior detailing had long been stripped away. But, characteristically, where others saw only mute, blank space, Amy saw potential. She soon engaged Michael Schmitt Architect and set out on a gut renovation inspired by the glories of the past and the promise of a bright new future.
