Amy Clark

The part of your room she owns

Windows, upholstery, pillows, cushions, trim. Not the floor plan, not the paint. It is a narrower brief than a decorator’s, on purpose. It is the part of a room that has to be made rather than bought.

Most projects start with a room somebody already loves and cannot quite finish. Usually Amy is solving a problem you had not put into words yet, and pointing at the thing that could be so much better.

Where it started

Her grandmother’s attic, and the trunks in it. She wanted to know how the things inside had been put together, so she took them apart to find out. The construction came first. The trade came a long time later.

Every one of them is invented

There is no guide for the window in front of her. Rooms are not standard. Houses here are rarely square, a ceiling half an inch out of level changes what a treatment has to do, and the published way of building something assumes an opening nobody actually has.

So she works every one out for the room it is going into. That is why she measures each opening herself instead of sending somebody, and why the person who decided how a thing should be built is the person who builds it.

Fabric

Fabric comes from the lines Amy represents. The list is short and stays short, because knowing what a cloth actually does at length is worth more than access to everything.

Schumacher opened that door when the studio was very small, and she has not forgotten it. It is the key to a design world she never had access to before.

A memo sample gives you the color. It will not tell you how the piece hangs after a season of being drawn every evening, and that is the part that decides whether your room still looks right in five years.