Renaissance Women: They’re Designers, They’re Dealers, They’re Divine!

by Cara Greenberg March 1, 2021

These multitasking entrepreneurs juggle interior design, furniture creation, retail and more. Here, they tell us how and why they do so much.

March is Women’s History Month, and we’re shining a light on four creative, accomplished women — Anna Karlin, Tara Shaw, Kelly Behun and Michael Del Piero — who have forged their own unique paths to design-world success, women whose careers give new meaning to the term multidisciplinary. Between them, they design interiors, furniture, lighting, rugs and jewelry; mastermind the manufacture of their products; operate chic retail galleries and, of course, sell on 1stDibs.

Like all 21st-century women, they’re building on the work of generations before them who fought for the rights of women to do anything and everything they damn well please.

Top: Kelly Behun paired a Campana Brothers sofa with a Konstantin Grcic armchair, a Jaime Hayon for BD Barcelona Monkey side table, a Gufram Cactus coatrack and AC Group artworks in a Hamptons living room. Photo by Stephen Kent Johnson

Her lavish book, Soul of the Home: Designing with Antiques, was published last spring by Abrams, and she’s on the verge of opening a new retail showroom in a turn-of-the-century building on New Orleans’s famous Magazine Street. Two years in the renovating, it will be filled with antiquities, mid-century Scandinavian design, contemporary furnishings and Shaw’s own line of reproduction European furniture, Tara Shaw Maison, which she launched in 2007 to make “more accurate and beautiful reproductions of the antique pieces I’d been guerrilla hunting for two decades.”

Shaw grew up in Louisiana and Texas having creative “free rein.” “I remember my grandmother checking me out of school one day to help her buy a car. I chose a black Mustang Fastback with a red leather interior. I was seven!” The only difficulties she has encountered as a businesswoman occurred when she began manufacturing furniture in rural China. “It was definitely a man’s world,” she recalls. “The factory owners would look at my translator, who was a man, and not at me. It took years for them to acknowledge that everything, from the carving to the finishes, was solely my decision.”