PHOTO BY TAHNEI ROY
Architect and interior designer Amy Vicente of Amy Grace Studios (amygracestudios.com) has turned her creative eye to a new pursuit: ceramics. She picked up the hobby while working for a corporate design firm that didn’t fill her creative cup. Fast forward six years later, and her large, hand-carved platters of giant shells and printed hibiscus have caught the eye of the island’s tastemakers and are sold in boutiques like Eimeo in Honolulu, Olive Boutique in Kailua, and Halelea Gallery in Kaua‘i. Vicente had a nomadic upbringing and spent the last two decades working in architecture and interior design in far-flung locales like Texas, Sydney, Bali, and France. Post-globe-trotting, Vicente landed in Hawai‘i and quickly found peace living on the island. Now she calls a 70s craftsman cottage on O‘ahu’s North Shore both her home, ceramic art studio and the residential design studio she just started earlier this year, House of Tropics. “There is so much beauty in these islands,” she says. “From the minerality and color pigment of the earth—which I’ve been really trying to add to my clay, an experiment in the making—to the texture of the reef, the patterns in the mollusks, the way things grow wild, wrapping around each other.” She hopes to soon expand this vision into a line of ceramic lighting fixtures and furniture.
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