2024 General Excellence in Interior Design: Emily Lauren Interiors
Emily Brown’s mastery of tone-on-tone palettes and complementary finishes graduates the Rising Star.
As published in Austin Home, April, 2024
Photos by Madeline Harper.
Imagine a natural setting, blending an array of whites and soft grays, some deep greens that range from bluish to reddish, browns and blacks, and a slightly muted brass that glimmers in the light. Now imagine that this was the entire color palette you had to work with. This is the chromatic world of Emily Brown, the Austin-based designer who launched her practice Emily Lauren Interiors in 2018, and won our Rising Star Award last year.
Born in Toronto and raised in different parts of the southeastern United States, Brown studied art and art history as an undergrad in Chicago, before spending five years in New York working as a graphic designer and in UX (user experience) design before it had a name. Though she excelled as a graphic designer, she was developing a sense that she wanted to work in three dimensions. When she moved with her husband from New York to a mid-century bungalow in Austin, she made the creative leap to interior design. Putting down roots in Texas made her very aware of the colors and textures of her new home: “Summers [in Austin] are like east coast winters,” she says. “Everything is yellow and brown. Wildflower season in the spring is beautiful: native plants grow everywhere.” And winter, she says, is when the lush greens are in full bloom.
Photos by Madeline Harper.
Inspired by the work of a firm she admired on Instagram, Brown met with the principal for coffee one afternoon and was unexpectedly offered a job on top of the advice and encouragement she had been hoping for. She worked happily with this established designer for five years before going solo, and learned every aspect of the business—both beautiful and practical—from the ground up. Today, her projects dot the landscape of Austin and environs, offering clients serene spaces crafted from impeccable materials.
Peruse her portfolio and you’ll notice a few themes. “I love earthy, moody colors: browns and warm tones, and that’s partly so that objects and works of art can shine through,” she says. She wants all the hard finishes to feel timeless. “I don’t want someone to say ‘I’m sick of red’ in a few years,” she says, noting that a client who wants to make a splash with some unusually vivid tile may live to regret the move, while softer elements like textiles and furniture are much easier to change. The only downside to adhering to a subtle palette? “There’s nowhere to hide,” Brown says. There are no distractions in a spare interior, so every element—texture, contrast, and material quality—must shine.
Photos by Madeline Harper.
When they first moved to Texas, Brown and her husband, a fellow art student, made it a point to visit key modern and contemporary art landmarks in the Southwest, from the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, to the Donald Judd Foundation in Marfa. The visual culture of the place and its distinctive landscape continues to inspire her. Going forward, she’s excited to start working on larger projects that need a distinctive design narrative and point of view: hotels, cafes, and shops, which is an area where her graphic and UX design background could really help a story take shape in three dimensions. She’s even been getting inquiries and started to take on projects as far afield as Florida and New York City.
Photos by Madeline Harper.
Living in Texas has come with some surprises and a new way of living (“You have to watch out for snakes and scorpions,” she says), but the collegial quality of the design community in Austin has won her heart. “Austin’s design culture has an extraordinary sense of unity,” says Brown. “Here, you won’t find cutthroat competition, but rather a collaborative network where designers, architects, and builders cheer each other on and build each other up.”