Hall Of Fame Designer Joseph Lembo Dies At 73

Another, they’d be clad in white paper painter’s garb—the kind you’d grab at the hardware store. “It was the seventies,” Bohn reminisces. “Everybody was doing crazy things!”

The two would spend the next 16 years as partners in the internationally acclaimed Lembo-Bohn Associates, operating out of a derelict triangular loft they chose to call “1 Gansevoort,” because it had no address (nor heat, windows, or roof) when they arrived. Here, they transformed the space into a thriving business, where they worked at the same desk, a 12-foot-long Shaker-style table, which Bohn uses in her dining room today.

Lembo-Bohn’s commissions were ambitious and global. The firm designed four ground-up buildings in Japan, executed work in Saudi Arabia, conceived the set design for Michael Cimino’s film Year of the Dragon. “Sometimes he’d propose something so outrageous, everyone would gasp,” Bohn recalls.

The Launch of Lembo Design 

In 1998, the same year of his Interior Design Hall of Fame induction, Lembo launched his practice, Lembo Design. Here, he took on projects ranging from Park Avenue apartments, a Connecticut farmhouse, to Montauk beach houses and art-filled homes in Scarsdale, New York. He was particularly drawn to quintessential American brands, designing the Florsheim Flagship on Madison Avenue and completing commissions for Ralph Lauren Home.

Film was a fundamental passion and source of inspiration for Lembo. His partner of 32 years, Laurence Waltman, recalls evenings spent watching the same movie repeatedly—The Age of Innocence, Dr. Strangelove, anything Merchant Ivory or Scorsese (albeit not with popcorn, but with a bowl of homemade spaghetti).

Lembo’s Love of Film Led To Cinematic Interiors 

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“He loved the texture of film,” says Waltman. “He really studied the interiors, the colors, the light. In another lifetime, he would have wanted to be a production designer.”

Fittingly, Lembo was tasked with designing a Manhattan pied-à-terre for filmmaker David Gordon Green in 2020, where Kubrick’s monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey inspired the apartment’s black fireplace wall. Green and Lembo bonded over their shared love of mirrored, etched, and dichroic glass; when Lembo suggested olive-drab tiles, Green was delighted, declaring, “Olive drab is favorite color.”

Waltman and Lembo were true partners in work and life, sharing a deep affinity for all things aesthetic and adventurous. “Joseph really taught me the world of interior design,” Waltman notes. “He was extremely humble about his abilities, his talents, his skills, his accomplishments, which are enormous.”

Together, the couple traveled the world, visiting Japan, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and naturally, Italy. Waltman remembers Joseph returning to Rome’s Pantheon, his favorite building on earth, every chance he could. He explored the Veneto architecture of Carlo Scarpa and the Japanese minimalism of Tadao Ando with equal vigor. His paternal family traced back to the Cilento Coast, and it is there he has chosen to rest.

Alongside his practice, Lembo was a tenured professor in the Interior Design Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology for seventeen years.

“He was a minimalist designer with a maximalist heart,” said one longtime friend and colleague. “He brought a world of knowledge and golden energy to everyone he met.”

Joseph Lembo is survived by his partner Laurence Waltman; four siblings, Anita Seitzman, Deborah Lembo, Michael Lembo, and Leah Lembo; and seven nieces and nephews. Contributions may be made to the Parsons School of Design, Interior Design Department, in memory of Joseph Lembo.