Setting the Table with Julia Amory

04.09.20

Setting the Table with Julia Amory

When you dress your table with designer Julia Amory’s linens in their bold patterns and bright hues, you infuse your event with a kind of joyful sophistication that elevates a special occasion or simply an everyday meal with pure joie de vivre. It’s fitting that her lifestyle brand, India Amory, was born serendipitously when, while planning her own wedding, she was unable to find the perfect linens and so sought about creating her own. With Easter thankfully around the corner, we felt like Julia Amory was the ideal person to discuss bringing some color and cheer to the table.While Julia Amory has a background in financial services, she grew up expressing herself creatively. “I grew up in a family of highly creative people; interior designers, publishers, editors, photographers. We didn’t have a TV, and my favorite form of entertainment was repurposing old manuscripts as sketching paper (on the backside). My parents enrolled me in second grade with a wonderful art teacher in New York who was very well known in the group of schools that Spence (where I went for all 13 years) was a part of. I studied there until my senior year and submitted my painting portfolio when I applied to college. I took classes at FIT and Parsons along the way. On the marketing side of things, my stepgrandmother is a woman named Alexandra Stoddard, who is a lifestyle expert and who really predated today’s generation of tastemakers in what she was doing. I’ve internalized so much from her over the years about living beautifully and cultivating a home. The transition into what I’m doing now actually felt very natural as it combined what I was passionate about and inherently GOOD AT with what I had learned about all the boring stuff, like margins while working on IPOs and learning about how companies successfully structured themselves.”Her early influences, education, and work experience led her to where she is now, enjoying the process of designing and working with clients to create beauty. “I love the process of successfully marketing something that brings me so much joy and connecting with people over their shared excitement for color and pattern. I adore seeing people getting excited over a tablescape.”While her prints are all gorgeous on their own, the mixing of her prints create a truly inspired look. To recreate this type of unique look on your own table though requires a bit of letting go and experimentation. “My favorite tablescapes turn out being the ones where nothing is planned in advance and I’m forced to think outside of the box and get creative about using what’s around. Right now we’re in Florida on an extended stay given what’s going on in the world and it’s been fun to get back to using whatever I can get my hands on. Often times I’ll take a photo and see how I feel about the shot and tweak it from there. I attribute it all back to my parents endlessly encouraging me to be creative, to paint, read, go to museums, know about and appreciate artists from a very early age.”