Andrew Martin Announces Lifetime Achievement Award Winner For 2022

We are thrilled to announce that Anouska Hempel was recently awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Andrew Martin Interior Designer of the Year ceremony!

On October 17th 2022, Andrew Martin, the global leader in eclectic and inventive interiors, celebrated the 26th anniversary of the Andrew Martin International Interior Designer Award. Founded by Martin Waller in 1996, the Award was created to fill what he has termed “a great void in the recognition of extraordinary talent in interior design” and to celebrate designers on the world stage.

A Programme First

To mark the occasion, Martin Waller, the company’s founder, presented the award programme’s first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award to Anouska Hempel, Lady Weinberg, on 17th October at a private ceremony at the V&A.

Anouska Hempel, Andrew Martin Interior Designer of the Year Awards 2022

Of the decision to award Anouska Hempel, Lady Weinberg with a Lifetime Achievement Award, Waller says, “So much design is typically an accumulation of ideas collected, reimagined and reassembled from previous generations and iterations – a validation of Isaac Newton’s, ‘if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’

But there are moments when individuals change our direction of travel. Just when you think matters are settled and progressing safely and sedately, someone switches the track and the train shoots off in a whole new direction. Such a moment happened at the end of the 1970s when Anouska Hempel opened Blakes Hotel. Celebrated as the first boutique hotel, it exploded into the senses as an expression of the decadence of the time. Actress, designer, couturier, hotelier, Anouska Hempel is the quintessence of a Renaissance woman. She came to London as part of the Antipodean invasion in the 1960s, which didn’t so much ride the zeitgeist as helped to create it. Her mastery of symmetry, geometry, repetition and scale gives her work an identity, instantly recognisable. And this allied to her famous/notorious perfectionism, has ensured that Anouska Hempel’s work electrifies today as it did almost half a century ago. We are proud to recognise her with the first Andrew Martin lifetime achievement award.”

On winning the Andrew Martin Lifetime Achievement Award, Lady Weinberg, says, “I am delighted and humbled, and I am working just as much as I always have. It is unexpected and thrilling to be acknowledged in this way.”