This Women-Run Studio Crafts Transformative Wall Treatments Using Venetian Plaster

Under the Kamp umbrella, Collins and her colleague, creative director Amy Morgenstern, have experimented with traditional Venetian plaster, cultivating new colors, texture, high gloss or matte. Everything they make is fully customizable, and they’re continually looking for new techniques, shapes, and effects to add to their repertoire.

Morgenstern joined the firm in 2010 as an apprentice following an equally unconventional educational path. Before meeting Collins, she attended the U.S. Military Academy and was planning on enrolling in Hofstra University’s pre-med program. “I’m not someone that reads instruction labels and follows protocol,” she tells Galerie. “I’m more the person that says, Let’s do things that no one’s seen before. Let’s do what isn’t prescribed and that’s been our way—taking over techniques and textures, cutting new tools that we were making up on the fly. Stopping the decorative aspect of plaster and the insertion of architectural.”

Today, Kamp is in high demand for its unique Venetian plaster fluting, which first gained major attention in the West Coast showroom of lighting design studio Apparatus. For cofounder Gabriel Hendifar, Collins and Morgenstern crafted a custom creamy vanilla shade, which has become one of their most requested colorways. “The ability to take a seed from a designer or architect and then create a sample set, that’s the best part,” says Collins of the collaboration.

“For the first time, we were becoming comfortable with our own aesthetic and working with so many designers that thought the glossy finish was the only thing you could do with plaster,” she adds. “We were doing more of what we really like, which people really love because it’s so authentic. It’s not decorative. It got really fun for us in that everyone wanted what we like and enjoy doing.”

The Kamp Studios team has also worked on Apparatus’s New York showroom, recently updating plaster walls they did years prior with a hand-carved inlay. Their work with plaster fluting has appeared everywhere from Nate Berkus’s Manhattan home to high-design boutiques Saturdays NYC and Marysia on New York’s Crosby Street. For the latter, they created the effect in a bubble-gum pink shade, with fluting running up walls and across the ceiling.

The team has also devised plaster techniques for Roc Nation’s executive suites on both coasts, and they are wrapping up a Los Angeles residence for a major young musician—a project that grew from few accent walls to a 20,000-square-foot job. “I think one of our most successful traits is our ability to build, really understand, and make something more than what a client thought it could be,” says Morgenstern, whose fills the firm’s Instagram page with hashtag #PlasterOverEverything.

Currently working on 30 different projects at any given time, Collins and Morgenstern—who remain a team of two with just a handful of applicators—are selective about the projects they’ll take on. But what they’re looking for the most is something that’s collaborative, with an element of trust.

“The designers who benefit the most from makers like us are the ones who allow creativity to become a collaboration and that relationship not be so one-dimensional,” Morgenstern says. “I personally live very, very far outside the box and so I think that’s something the industry is seeing more and more of.”