'When We Were Still Getting to Know Each Other, We Bought Matching Antique Cast Iron Horse Hooks. It Was Sort of Like We Branded Each Other' – How Design Duo Nickey Kehoe Went From Strangers to Founders of One of America’s Most Renowned Studios
As part of our Layered Lives series, we get to know the founders behind Nickey Kehoe. Here, Todd Nickey and Amy Kehoe talk about what makes their partnership click
The origin story of Nickey Kehoe always begins in Manhattan, at a dinner party. The details are fuzzy – something about a glass of creamer spilling on the table set things in motion. But Todd Nickey and Amy Kehoe, strangers at the time, mostly recall giggling upon their first meeting, an instant connection that would later shape a quiet force in American design.
It’s hard not to feel a twinge of jealousy. Not only because the pair launched their interiors studio nearly two decades ago and quickly racked up a roster of high-profile clients, or because they opened a beloved Los Angeles shop–and a recent NYC outpost–widely touted as go-to destinations for home decor and vintage. More than that, there's something enviable about their foundation: a business and a brand built on friendship.
And, in an era when interior studios launch furniture lines and collaborations left and right, Nickey Kehoe is something of a north star, having bridged the gap long ago between shaping environments and selling products. From furniture to wallpapers and even fragrances – and soon, new textiles – there’s plenty of material for building your own Nickey Kehoe universe.
At the center of it all is the enduring bond between Nickey and Kehoe themselves. Here, as part of our Layered Lives series, Homes & Gardens speaks with the friends and founders about how it all began, how their lives overlap, and how intuition and trust continue to guide a brand rooted in platonic love.
Homes & Gardens: What are your earliest, formative moments in design?
Todd: For me, it was an early compunction to move my room around. When I was five or six, I picked out this minty color for the walls of my room. Then two years later I was into beige stucco and orange and brown stripes. If I were staying home sick from school, there was a very strict policy that I wasn't allowed to move furniture.
Amy: How old were you when you did the wallpaper?
Todd: At sixteen, my parents went away for a week during the summer. And of course I didn't have a party: I re-wallpapered the kitchen. They were really pissed – but it looked so much better.
Amy: For a lot of creatives, you're just maybe more aware that there's atmosphere. My grandmother lived in the city, and we’d spend most Fridays and Saturdays with her. Everything was a reproduction, and her brother painted the Degas ballerinas – this wasn’t a place any of us would be like, “Let’s move in.” But it had grandeur to me. That awareness just stuck.
Homes & Gardens: What were you each exploring creatively in the period before you met?
Amy: I think chasing beauty was an unnamed path. I went to school in New Orleans at Tulane, and there were light bulbs going off around architecture and color. I was a French major and did my year abroad in Paris – that year was a lot of art history classes and studying at the Sorbonne. I didn’t know what I was going to do with any of it. Then I landed in New York and got a couple of first jobs in the industry – in those first one or two jobs, we met as friends.
Homes & Gardens: And that was early in your career – whereas Todd was a bit older and had a longer journey toward interiors?
Todd: I had a lot of jobs. When I moved to New York from DC, I worked in independent film, quickly moving into the art and costuming departments. I drifted into merchandising at Giorgio Armani, doing windows and displays, and later joined Ralph Lauren. At Ralph, it was just a very, very elaborate decorating program. Every week you're redoing six or seven windows, coming up with a theme correlated to the fashion. It was so exhilarating, and such a tuning fork for what it was that I had an ear for. And then from there, I worked my way into interior design.
Amy: You found it at last!
Todd: I found it at last – but between you, me, and the law, I never took a design class.
Homes & Gardens: And this is when Nickey met Kehoe. What are your first memories of this?
Amy: Laughter. We sat next to each other at a dinner party and giggled. When you're younger, you're out more, and you meet more people. But even then, it was sort of like, “Oh, this doesn't happen that much.”
Todd: It was so innocent, with no intention of working together someday – it was just, “God, I really like you.” We’d heard about each other through mutual friends who invited us to a dinner with someone I was dating. And he was like, “I just really feel like you’re gonna like Amy.” He and I are no longer together, but Amy and I are.
Amy: One of our first friend dates was going to the flea market in New York. It was so innocent. We were still getting to know each other, and we bought matching antique cast iron horse hooks – it was sort of like we branded each other.
Todd: A friendship bracelet of sorts.
Homes & Gardens: Did you recognize at that time that you had a shared design language?
Amy: As much as we’re drawn to similar things, we’re also drawn to different things. But when one of us points something out, it inspires the other. That’s the common thread in shopping, sourcing, and designing together.
Todd: Even when our aesthetics are different, they live well next to each other. We don’t just gravitate towards one thing. I think there's a deep respect and understanding of where the other one is coming from.
Amy: That being said, our team might be doing product development or prototyping and we're given three options – if we're in separate rooms, we'll pick the same thing. So there is a kind of a brass tax to those decision-making processes that has been a big energy mover in the business. That sort of sensibility has taken years for us to get to this point.
Todd: And we tend to dress similarly as well, showing up in the same outfit for meetings – which is never awkward.
Homes & Gardens: The chemistry was there. Did you have a vision for the big picture?
Amy: There wasn’t a business plan or a launch date. I feel for younger people starting things now. With the way the world works, and Instagram, there’s no bumbling, stumbling time – that laboratory of figuring out how it works before announcing it to the world. I’m really grateful that was our era – the ability to learn our process before it was this glossy thing.
Todd: We just slowly evolved, and it still evolves. That became the strong muscle of the business – we weren't afraid to change. And I think some of that came from an era when you didn't have to have it all defined in the first two weeks of being open.
Homes & Gardens: After Nickey Kehoe was born, you worked on some hotel projects. But then a home in Los Feliz was a turning point.
Amy: It was demanding. It was a very large, opulent house – not the kind of thing you saw in New York, ever. It pushed us. The clients had a little bit more modernity than Todd and I at that moment. I think we were more earthier at the time.
Todd: It pushed us into a much bigger world of elegance that had some room for rusticity, but a little more refined with Italian and French mid-century modern. It was just a huge – I don't want to say eye opener, because we knew of it – but we started layering that into our aesthetic.
Amy: We both had a sense that this was a big project for us – in LA, and for our tastes. It definitely helped our studio flourish from there.
Homes & Gardens: Vintage became a large part of your repertoire. Why is that?
Todd: Part of what we do, part of the lifeline – the secret sauce – is just making sure in every project, we include vintage pieces. There it is. A lot of times, it's people's heirlooms, something that somebody has in their family. Because it is really important, I think, to have pieces that people connect with. I think it creates an energy – that kind of inherent, intangible feeling of a room.
Homes & Gardens: And if you had to put your aesthetic, and that secret sauce into words?
Amy: A takeaway we're both comfortable with, no matter what, is warmth and invitation. I know it's not era-specific or genre-specific. But when we're described that way and by people in the store, or people who see our projects, that tracks. It’s a huge part of what we aim to do.
Todd: “Assembled” always comes to mind. We build projects with a lot of eras, a lot of periods. There isn't a formula for it. I mean, I think that's the formula: there really is no formula. We're very drawn to what we're drawn to, but that is such a wide range, from a '70s stainless steel console table to a Rococo mirror. The effect is the ability to weave those together without them feeling like somebody's trying to have a shtick. They become usable and friendly.
Homes & Gardens: You opened your first store in LA in 2008. What guides what you pick for the merchandise?
Amy: The shop does have to take into account an appetite for certain things, or holes in the market. When we're shopping, that comes into the decision-making. But I think it starts with passion, the hit of the heart. Like, “Oh my god, that is so beautiful, I want to find out more about it.”
Todd: We go to flea markets together around the world, and it's so exciting to push each other further. It’s that pinky swear that we have, like “This might seem insane, but what do you think about this?” It just kind of pushes that boundary further than if I'm alone or Amy's alone in the flea market – because we have a co-signer on the insanity.
Amy: It's healthy validation.
Todd: And that’s the beauty of it now. Our sales team, they're like, “If you guys like it, somebody's gonna love it.” There's a sweetness to that.
Homes & Gardens: You opened a second store in NYC in 2024. You’re a go-to source for home decor and interior inspiration. What’s next?
Todd: We're actually starting a small fabric line to upholster our furniture with – what a novel idea! We're tiptoeing into it. We're doing some fabrics that will be part of our wallpaper collection, incorporating them into fabrics. We're kicking it off with probably 10 basics that will be have a lot of integrity, a lot of color.
Amy: We make so much furniture, and we have so many people that don't work with designers, so it's been in our ear for a while. There's so much stacked in front of us at all times, but we are excited about the partner, it’s very simpatico. Once we met them, it was sort of like, “Okay, it's time.”
Todd: And they're a mill – they have their own line, but they're working with us to develop our own line. This is actually just our fabric. And, like many things that we try to do, it's based in LA. It's really exciting.
Homes & Gardens: Fabric was, after all, tied to the very naming of Nickey Kehoe.
Todd: There’s a sweet memory from soon after I moved here, when we’d decided to inch toward working together. We were in the house I’d rented, sewing drapes for Amy’s apartment on my sewing machine and talking about what we would name the company. We had all these funny ideas, everyone weighing in, and then finally thought, what about Nickey Kehoe? It very quickly became the name.
Layered Lives is Homes & Gardens’ in-depth interview series with iconic creatives, where conversations delve far beyond the surface. We explore the memories, possessions, and passions that shape their aesthetic – revealing the personal stories and experiences that inform their work. Each feature is a richly layered portrait of life as well as design, offering you a glimpse into the minds and lives of the people behind the rooms we admire.
Last month's Layered Lives took us inside the world of potter, sculptor, interior designer and author Jonathan Adler.
