From furniture designer to Interior Designer, Kate Hamilton Gray talks with us about her professional journey, a recent collaboration with her friend Rebecca Atwood, and what keeps her inspired.

by Claire Hung
November 11, 2020

Kate Hamilton Gray completed her furniture design degree at RISD, the famed US Art school known for producing some of the most prolific artists and designers we know today - Kara Walker & Nicole Miller to name a few. It was at RISD that Kate became good friends with Rebecca Atwood, now a successful textile designer with her own line of fabrics & wallpapers. Together the two collaborated on this year’s Real Simple Home Master Bedroom, in which Kate seamlessly blends several patterns & textures from Rebecca Atwood’s collection to create a bedroom that was not only kid-friendly & durable, but that didn’t skew overly feminine.

This isn’t the first time the two have collaborated - Kate also designed Rebecca’s New York City showroom in the heart of Nolita - a space that is brimming with beautiful details & flexible design, necessary for a retail space.

So how did Kate go from furniture designer to Interior Designer? Well, it all started at her first design job out of college working for Harry Allen, a product designer. There she was exposed to designing for retail environments, which involved developing concepts from renderings to sourcing materials & working within the finer details of millwork, lighting & materiality.

From there, she taught herself how to draft using AutoCAD while gaining experience in the vendor side of Interior Design, until she landed a top-notch gig with Studio DB, the husband & wife team, Damian and Britt Zunino. During her 8-year stint with Studio DB, Kate learned the ins & outs of not only Interior Design but Architecture, and gained valuable experience that now lends to her well-executed interiors.

For Kate, the exploration of layering, space planning & problem solving is what drives her love for Interior Design, not to mention the inspiration she gathers from the design community at large. Taking little bits of inspiration from different sources, like art, design & nature - she feels creatively driven from an artistic place. For Kate, it’s about approaching each project as if producing a one-of-a-kind painting - she sees it as an art project. And within that she integrates the history of the space with the Client’s taste & desires to achieve an end result that feels both personal & unique.

But like many of us here at Interior Collab, we know that the work of an Interior Designer, Decorator or Architect is no easy feat. Kate loves to dive into the design details, whether its hardware, plumbing fixtures, custom millwork or trim. But sometimes, like us all, we encounter design challenges & common little mishaps (we’re human after all) that happen along the way. For Kate, she sees them as opportunities to explore what often becomes better than the original design concept, and she always prepares her Clients for the unknowns at the start of a project.

For Kate, it’s about “finding elegant solutions to unexpected problems,” and we think that’s evident in the interiors she creates!

When Kates not pulling together elevated spaces for her Clients, she’s either knitting, painting or enjoying a good hard workout at the park with her favorite trainer.

Hamilton Gray Studio is taking project requests for the start of 2021, if interested please contact her by clicking the button below.

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