Party in the gallery for (20)24
Celebrating the most creatively rewarding year yet: Birthday Art Direction & Interview with Amanda Pratt of Salon Design
Merry Christmas from London! As the year comes to a close, today’s 2024 finale send is a two-part piece in celebration of many:
1) I turned 24 in November and hosted my dream birthday party at Salon Design’s airy gallery in Tribeca. This was a deeply personal (and fun!) art direction project to plan and execute, which today’s Desk Crits will document.
2) 2024 was my most creatively rewarding year yet - and the first year I’ve felt truly at home in New York. It has been an immense joy to get to know and share the city with so many phenomenal galleries, artists, designers, visionaries, and kindred spirits I so admire. One such individual is Salon Design’s founder, Amanda Pratt, whose story I am honored to share in the interview today.
Last but not least, Taming the Light grew a lot (5x) this year! As I wrote in my 2023 recap, this Substack started 2 years ago as my personal blank canvas for creative introspection - and has now expanded far beyond my own little universe. My heart brims with gratitude for your continued support as I take more creative risks and evolve.
Much more to come in the new year. For now, onto the Crit.
Love, LK
I’ve never liked throwing birthday parties. It always seemed too self-indulgent and too much pressure. But in many ways, this year felt right: I’m hitting my stride creatively, New York took on a feeling of home I’ve never felt before, and there’s so many beautiful people here I want to share my celebration with.
So where to celebrate? A gallery space seemed the most fitting. I’ve spent so much time—and found so much solace, grounding, and inspiration—in galleries all around the world this year. I wanted to carry forward this feeling in my birthday gathering.
Here’s the party art direction behind-the-scenes:
The Setting: Salon Design
From the moment I first walked past its airy ground-floor showroom on Vestry Street in Tribeca, I was instantly captivated by Salon Design’s stunning curation of women-led contemporary furniture and decor. When the dates aligned to book Salon’s space for my special day, I knew to look nowhere else. A heartfelt thank you to Amanda, founder of Salon (our interview included below) for being the most accommodating host!
Visual Ingredients
For the “look and feel” of the party, I wanted to accentuate the colors and textures found in the gallery’s existing show, while adding in fresh complementary elements to pull together a cohesive mood. The final palette consists of soft, warm pastels with metallic and earthy accents, all to evoke a sense of comfort, femininity, and playfulness.
The Palette:
Textural Elements:
1. Soft florals
Romantic, delicate white and pink peonies for the bar and the cake table
2, 6. Woven textiles
Details from Crafting Topographies, the collection of Morii textiles and embroideries on display at Salon. The abstracted, organic woven patterns ground the space with beautiful earthy tones, while adding another dimension of interest for guests to encounter together
3. Pink satin
I wore Bec + Bridge’s strapless moon dance maxi in blush. I love how the satin texture and draped low cowl back instill extra sophistication to the minimal silhouette. Soft blush echoes through both the dress and peonies, so textural contrast drives differentiation here
4. Silver clouds
As twist on the classic metallic balloon banners spelling out “happy birthday”, I dispersed individual balloon letters throughout the gallery floor as a dynamic installation for guests to interact with.
This was inspired by a formative moment in my creative life: seeing Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds (1966) installation, a delightful room full of reflective helium balloons enchantingly hovering in space, as a college freshman in 2018. I had just began covering arts and culture for The Stanford Daily. My first published story was on the Cantor’s Contact Warhol exhibition that concluded with a showing of Warhol’s Silver Clouds against Merce Cunningham’s Rainforest dance at Bing Concert Hall. I so vividly recall sitting awestruck in the audience, utterly overcome with an intense yearning for art and beauty to always hold serious space in my life - no matter what I would grow up to do. Dear younger Lyndsey, I did not let you down.
5. Vanilla funfetti
None other than the classic Magnolia Bakery confetti cake, with pink vanilla and mint green buttercream. A sweet pastel dream!
A Collaborative Painting
Inspired by the Surrealist game of exquisite corpse, the central activity of the birthday party is a live collaborative painting. I set up a blank canvas on an easel and laid out paint and brushes. Each and every guest was invited to make their mark, with only very loose guidance: how do you feel right now? What do you want to express in this moment?
Over the course of the evening, the painting took on a life of its own. With unspoken rhythm, like an improvisational dance, mountains and forests emerged. Basquiat-esque strokes laid on. Bold colors and geometries evolved to conceal, reveal.
It was then that I realized, after all this time, perhaps this is what we are really celebrating on birthdays: giving, taking, arriving, departing, uniting, splitting, tangling, untangling, pushing, pulling, serendipity, kismet, and all the sharing, caring, and loving along the way – a palimpsest of life’s beautiful, brilliant poetry.
It felt right to end the year this way.
Thank you for a transcendent 2024.
Hope you enjoyed the Desk Crit - birthday edition! Read on for my interview with Amanda Pratt, founder of Salon Design, the gorgeous design gallery where I hosted my celebration.
Meet Amanda Pratt, Founder of Salon Design
Amanda Pratt is an interior designer, art advisor, and founder of the Tribeca-based contemporary design gallery Salon Design. Prior to moving back to the States to found Salon in 2018, Amanda had a decade-long business career in Hong Kong. Today, Salon Design is a mainstay in the Tribeca Design District, showcasing thoughtfully curated, studio-made collectible design in its airy ground floor space on Vestry Street. Salon’s dynamic global roster includes both emerging and established designers, artists, and artisans, of which 80% are women.
I got to know Amanda through hosting my birthday at Salon, and we quickly bonded over our shared experiences of living as American expats in Asia and navigating careers at the intersection of creativity and business. I sat down with Amanda over coffee two weeks ago, and am beyond thrilled to share our conversation here with you.
You had an unconventional path into interior design. Tell me about your journey and what prompted the creative pivot 6 years ago?
I studied engineering at Princeton for undergrad. My parents were engineers and very practical people. I’ve always had a creative interest but the creative industry is tough to break into without financial support - you make close to no money starting out.
So I went into business first. I worked for Merrill Lynch, and then on the business side of fashion. My husband’s career kept moving us around—we spent 12 years in Hong Kong—and I was tired of trying to find a new job and justifying myself in a business setting. Being in fashion also made me realize how much I miss being responsible for creation and curation instead of just numbers.
The confluence of these factors made me want to start a creative platform that I can bring with me regardless of where I move to. I went and got a master’s in interior architecture at Inchbald in London, then returned to the States and started my interior architecture firm in 2018. That evolved into Salon Design today.
How would you characterize Salon Design’s ethos?
From the very beginning, I wanted to build Salon in a way that aligns with my personal ethos and can have longevity.
I’ve always been a minimalist and value having a few really nice things. In Asia you don’t have a lot of space to store things. Everything is very purposefully designed and there is not much excess. Moving a lot also meant everything I acquire will ultimately be packed on a container ship, so I learned to be extra selective.
When I came back to the US, I was disappointed in the mass culture of “acquire and toss out” I saw here. Part of the issue was the over-inflated art market with people throwing money at everything. We ended up with all this lumpy, ugly furniture made of crappy materials. I really wanted to change that.
We are just now starting the canon of collectible design, and I think what makes Salon special is our focus on women and their craft. All these beautiful techniques like embroidery and hand carving practiced by generations of artisans are now dying out. It’s increasingly hard to get younger generations to do this.
When I look for people who partner with craft communities to bring a contemporary lens to age-old techniques, it’s not just about maintaining but elevating craft, which in turn creates opportunities for the maker communities. They feel valued. They’re being compensated in a way that allows them to invest in their own children. It goes full circle.
With technology today, yes you can program machines to weave textiles into any pattern you want. But I think there's something so fundamentally beautiful and human about watching somebody embroider with their hands. It's true craft. The women weavers we work with sit in circles to weave together. They focus intently on the task at hand. They chat about relationships and family. When we scale and automate, we also lose these moments of connection.
Then there’s the connection in the gallery too. When someone comes into Salon to look at these embroidered Morii pieces, I can say this piece was made by a woman from this region in India, she worked on this embroidery for six months. It’s really about bringing people together - whether it’s between the gallerist and the buyer or the buyer meeting a piece of the makers through their work.
You just got back from seeing shows in Australia and Miami. What does your day-to-day look like?
It’s a little bit of everything. I see shows mostly when I travel - Australia was three back-to-back days of seeing group shows and going to Craft Victoria. It’s absolutely incredible. So many people we represent were showing there and we’re helping them expand to the US. It’s a real pleasure discovering all these incredible makers and designs in person.
I used to go out to see a lot more, and now I’m very intentional about where we want to spend time and what to add to our collection. It’s a business decision that’s also personal to me: Salon’s two top-performing categories are lighting and site-specific art, because those are two of my favorite things. Because of my engineering background, I’ve developed a really robust and unique lighting program very early on. What we do is a bit more complicated than your average design gallery or art advisor. We work with clients to propose interior architecture projects and bring the works in.
When I’m back here in New York it’s mostly heads-down work. Also lots of meetings and strategizing. Right now we’re trying to get all orders closed by the end of the year. We’re also working on a rebrand in the new year to become AM Collective. We’ll be moving spaces into a townhouse in the West Village, which has a big garden that we can put sculptures in. A lot of planning and PR goes into that.
What does beauty mean to you?
Beauty to me is a feeling of comfort and rapture when I walk into a space. It’s peace and contentment. When something takes my breath away.
By nature of what I do, what I find beautiful evolves a lot over time. Sometimes beautiful things are not impactful. Sometimes when you look at something, whether or not you think it’s visually beautiful, it has serious power over you and evokes intense emotion.
I also think you can find something ugly and then familiarize yourself and attach a feeling to it, and suddenly it feels beautiful. I was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art weeks ago - I gravitated towards this painting that I've seen so many times. For whatever reason, the way that colors and light interacted this time made me see new beauty in it that I never saw before.
When was your last encounter with beauty?
Isn’t it every day? This morning I walked into the gallery and saw our ceramic flowers and wall ornaments by Cee & She. They are so fragile, and each one is a little bit different. They’re absolutely beautiful.
Maybe another morning the light will hit the chandeliers in a different way, or I might have somebody send me some new work that’s beautiful. I feel very fortunate to encounter beauty in my work every day.