When Michael Met Amy

For this ascendant designer and a Manhattan client with high-rise Central Park views, it was midcentury-modern love at first sight

Written by Craig Kellogg • Photographed by Roger Davies
Produced By Susan Tyree Victoria

VIEW MORE PHOTOS Photo: Roger Davies

Private investor and entrepreneur Michael Hirtenstein met New York interior designer Amy Lau through the Internet. Call it the beginning of his romance with 20th-century furniture. In fact, it was Hirtenstein’s assistant who played cupid, surfing to Lau’s website and vetting her over the phone. When the designer and client were finally introduced, Hirtenstein says, he “liked her energy and her style.” Then he hired her, adding that he wanted his newly rented 3,000-square-foot, three-bedroom apartment to be completed in two months flat, down to the barware and candles.

“Two months was unrealistic for that scale,” notes Lau, who founded her firm, Amy Lau Design, in 2000. The personable designer, a graduate of Sotheby’s prestigious masters program in fine and decorative arts, nevertheless delivered the total package in just three, having honed her curatorial skills as director of Aero under Thomas O’Brien and later as design director of the noted Lin/Weinberg Gallery, which specializes in midcentury pieces.

The open living/dining room presented one of several big challenges. Hirtenstein decreed that nothing should block the view, so Lau chose a classically low Vladimir Kagan sofa and window-framing floor-to-ceiling drapes.

One of their biggest purchases was a monumental room divider consisting of 196 interlocking textured glass links. “We needed a big piece of art or something bold,” Lau explains. It took three days to arrange the composition on the wall. Hirtenstein insisted upon 1950s Canadian chairs he first spotted while visiting the designer’s studio. “He wouldn’t leave until I sold them to him,” she laughs.

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