‘We’re like a caveman rock crushers,’ says Samuel Amoia, with a laugh. With a remit that encompasses both furniture and spatial interior design, Amoia founded the eponymous studio with his brother in the autumn of 2015.
For his latest offerings, in an exclusive collaboration with the DeLorenzo Gallery (for whom Amoia Studio also revamped their Madison Avenue digs last November), Amoia devised a series of consoles and coffee tables that are a ‘great representation of who I am now’. The maturing designer has a proclivity for natural materials, including malachite from the Congo, lapis lazuli from India and red jasper from across Africa, that he then crushes by hand. He explains how ‘everything is made by hand, so there’s no technology involved’; thus, ‘using what’s already there and not destroying the environment’.
For this capsule collection, highlights include a white onyx and brass shavings console table, in a style evoking Wiener Werkstätte geometric symmetry. The idea to repurpose these shavings came to Amoia after grilling his fabricator about their their usage. ‘Oh, we throw them out,’ said the technician.
The collection also took form through conversations with DeLorenzo owner Anthony DeLorenzo and director Adriana Friedman, who since the 1980s have been dealing in and consulting with the top designers of the 20th century.
‘Sam is the only artist we’ve worked with that is contemporary,’ reveals Friedman, ‘We’ve been looking for many, many years. Our aim was to look for someone who had a fresh viewpoint and offered something new’ – but who still was able to evoke the historical or even transcend time markers. ‘I love how you can put any of his pieces next to a [Émile-Jacques] Ruhlmann... or even a Tiffany piece,’ Friedman concludes.
