LUCIA LAWRENCE, ASID, LEAVES LEGACY IN LAWRENCE & SCOTT

California native Lucia Lawrence had a lifelong love of art and business. By the mid-'50s she established Lucia Lawrence, Inc., and, with a team of ASID interior designers, served commercial and residential clients in Southern California. She wrote a newspaper column entitled "Dear Decorator." Her importing career began in Kyoto, where she bought artifacts that she sold through her design business on Beverly Blvd. in Los Angeles.

In the '60s and early '70s, Lucia added a new business venture with the start of Wanderlust Travel. Along with business partner, Lloyd Scott Kirsch, she escorted travelers and a noted National Geographic photographer to remote destinations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The combination of travel to remote places, rich with antiques and skilled artisans and her interior design experience, were the seeds of her next venture, Lawrence & Scott.

When she was overseas, she would seek out people with artistic talents and she began working and designing with them. Among the first objects she began to manufacture and import were a collection of replicas of bronze Shang Dynasty vessels, still made today by Lawrence & Scott, and represented in Seattle at the Stephen E. Earls Showroom.

Lucia and Lloyd married in 1988, and they relocated to Seattle into a home they built in the Highlands with Ralph Anderson, AIA, and a warehouse headquarters for Lawrence & Scott in Georgetown. "My mother proudly maintained her ASID membership until the end of her long and remarkable life, just as she maintained her day to day interest in our family company and the world of design," says daughter and Lawrence & Scott Managing Director, Marcia Van Liew.