Artist Deborah Moss and Her Creative Journey

About two years ago, the work of Deborah Moss, the Canadian artist and cofounder of the internationally renown Moss & Lam design studio, took a profound turn.

From large-scale, commissioned installations at hotels, retailers and office buildings, Moss downsized her staff from 20 to six and shifted to projects that felt more personal, self-expressive and less corporate.

Over a period of three and half decades, she created artwork for Four Seasons hotels, The Peninsula Hotel, Cartier, three-dimensional art installations for Tiffany and Lane Crawford, and also collaborated with prestigious interior design firms Yabu Pushelberg and Burdifilek, and fashion brands Joe Fresh and Louis Vuitton.

“I was involved in a certain aspect of installation art for corporate interiors, hotels, shops, creating finishes, murals, very decorative things,” Moss said. “It was great. It was privileged work. I learned amazing things working with a huge team of designers, clients, purchasing agents and contractors, on projects sometimes four or five years in the making. While I was so used to being a resource as opposed to being a single voice, I had this growing sense of urgency to become more of an autonomous studio, exploring my own creative sense and what mattered to me.” The repositioning, she said, was “risky, and scary and involved letting go of an identity” at Moss & Lam. But a different approach was what she needed.

Next spring, Moss is introducing a line of marble tiles she’s designing for a high-end tile and stone slab supplier in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, called Ciot. “It’s about pattern, repetition, color, which is kind of my bailiwick. We’re designing it, they fabricate it, and then people can choose to use it however they want,” Moss explained. “There’ll be two or three patterns in four to five different marbles. It’s a luxury item.…I love that relationship of delivering a product for a fabricator.”

For Nienkämper, a Toronto-based designer and manufacturer of office, hospitality and institutional furniture, she designed the “Moss” wood veneer table for corporate offices, with a “floating” metal panel underneath that hides computer cables. It’s available in different colors and sizes, and could used as a dining table or for corporate applications.

Moss is also working with a 175-year-old, painted Portuguese tile company called Viúva Lamego, located on the outskirts of Sintra. “I felt this kindred spirit in the sense they have artists painting tiles. They have artists mixing glazes. They have a technical team. They have a sales team, and they do everything for everyone. They’re commissioned by leading architects around the world. But I was brought in to design something new for them, something just theirs — a line of terra cotta tiles,” launching early summer 2026. “We’re also working on a line of custom mural tiles for them.”

With Manetti, a terracotta tile company located outside Florence in Italy, Moss created a line of outdoor “Colonna” tables made of terra cotta.

“I’m meeting new people with new ways of working. It’s a pleasure visiting these companies,” Moss said. “It’s not glamorous. Some of these facilities are far away in little villages. But there’s a similarity. A kinship. These are people care about what they make, and they’re very good at what they do.”

“Moss & Lam is still Moss & Lam, but what Moss & Lam had been doing — wall finishes, murals, installations — I realized I had to just cut it off. It was too absorbing. My furniture product would suffer because it was always the second child or it just didn’t get the attention it needed. I had to be full on with the Moss & Lam stuff. So I decided to do a hard edit, though it wasn’t like I was going off on an unchartered limb, because we had our furniture line, and luckily about four years ago, we were picked up by Holly Hunt,” a company that designs, produces and showcases custom-made indoor and outdoor furniture, lighting, rugs, textiles and leathers. “That was amazing wind in my sails and incredibly validating. I feel very, very happy designing furniture.” Moss’ team now consists an operations person, two project managers who are industrial engineers, a master 3D artist working on molds and maquettes, and two young artists.

Moss’ “Walking Bear” table has long been produced, but never for outdoors because it required a different technology and material that Moss wasn’t involved with. “Holly kept asking, ‘Please, please, can we adapt these for outdoors?’ because there were requests coming in.” Eventually, Hunt connected Moss with a manufacturer in the U.S. who had the proper material for the outdoor tables. “It’s been fantastic because they’re now replicated in an outdoor sustainable material. It’s a fiberglass resin cement product,” Moss said. Holly Hunt also carries the Colonna tables, as well as Moss’ tinted “Gesture Mirror” created in a circular cast bronze design.

Moss met her husband Edward Lam while both attended the Ontario College of Art and Design. After graduating, the two cofounded Moss & Lam in 1989. “We thought we better make a bit of money, but we never thought it would become a business. We didn’t really know what a business was. So fast-forward 30 years, my husband passed away [in 2013] but I just kept on going, because this is what I knew, and it was a language I knew. We were good with colors and paint. Edward’s brother gave us a car, and it was also a really opportune time to get into business. That world of finishes was very new, and it was something we could just do. I also had a personal interest that I hid from most of my artist friends, of being into design and decorative things that was more of a family culture. My mother was always decorating the house and changing wallpapers and colors. Our house was always different from other people’s houses. It was very important to my parents. They collected ceramics and paintings and things so nice. I saw how what you chose to live with affected your life. So I was quite aware of interior design trends.

“I have a collection of little turtle statues. In high school, a young man gave me a turtle statuette, and that started me off liking little turtles. My parents had dog figurines from England. They’re on my mantelpiece. I do want to do another line of animal pieces, more a little line of decorative accessories.

Moss said her personal style is somewhat eclectic. “I will choose what I like. It doesn’t matter if it’s a collectible or something I found on the street in Japan. How I design product is a bit different. It’s meant to be functional and usable. The chair has to be support people; the table has to be the right height. It’s highly considered. It’s livable. We often play with a combination of organic and rigid, yin-yang, soft-hard. Appreciating both in one. There’s an element of what works now will also work in 20, 30, 40 years from now. Durability, legacy — that’s very important.

“I don’t go to the big shows, I get more inspiration from traveling, from books or going to museums,” Moss said. “I follow the art world more than the design world. Fashion is interesting in terms of really pushing boundaries ahead of the curve compared to the interior design world where the turnaround is slower but very good at absorbing and interpreting trends. It’s a much slower process, and it’s a privilege to be able to absorb ideas and concepts and then express them slowly, as opposed to fashion, which has to be on a quick cycle of innovation and news.”