A World Of Experience

Mark McMenamin -- Interior Design, 6/1/2008 12:00:00 AM

It was 1980, and Lulu de Kwiatkowski was hovering over New York's Westhampton coastline in a helicopter piloted by her industrialist father. She saw the sparkling sand of the beach, the organic geometry of farmland. If 8-year-olds are capable of epiphanies, this was it. Her destiny and, ultimately, her body of work as a textile designer would be defined by exploration.

She traveled extensively through her 20's, pausing to study trompe l'oeil painting in Paris. Absorbing florals in India and abstraction in Morocco, she developed her signature painting style. A visit to a tiny mill in northwestern France led to the launch of Lulu DK residential textiles.

"My entire first line was based around the stunning colors of the native tribes' beadwork in Africa," she says. Her second line evoked the faded pastels of Italian port towns. In many ways her unwritten travelogue, the company just added contract and outdoor collections.

Two years ago, on a trip to Southeast Asia, she got the idea to merge years of travel photos, journal entries, drawings, and fabric renderings into a series of collages. AMMO Books is now publishing them as Lulu, a 192-page patchwork of experiences that directed her personal and artistic path.

Her travels at the moment are mostly between her homes in New York and Los Angeles, but she's about to embark on a journey of a very different sort. She and her husband are expecting twin boys this fall.

Lulu de Kwiatkowski on an island in Lake Titicaca, on the border of Bolivia and Peru.