Benjamin Moore Names HUE Award Winners

Amy Wax of Montclair has won the top prize for Residential Exteriors in the 2010 Benjamin Moore HUE Awards. Wax is the first professional color consultant to receive a HUE Award. A student of color theory with a B.F.A. from Syracuse University, she combined her educational background and family ties in real estate to create her business, Your Color Source Studios, Inc., which offers color advice to homeowners and building and design professionals.

The residential exteriors that helped earn Wax her HUEY include a Victorian-style house in her hometown of Montclair. The base is a rich, historic shade, with trims in more whimsical colors that draw the eye to the details of the architecture genre. In the same community, Wax transformed a white stucco three-story home by using a mossy green base with terra cotta and brown trims. The resulting makeover is suggestive of Arts and Crafts design.

The HUEYs, established in 2005 by Benjamin Moore to recognize those in architecture and interior design whose work embodies “a passion for color usage,” will be handed out to the honorees on May 5 at the Museum of Arts and Design, Columbus Circle, New York City. Six firms altogether won Benjamin Moore HUE Awards this year.

Each of the four Competition Honorees will receive a paint-drop-shaped HUE glass sculpture and $5,000 cash prize. Besides Amy Wax, they include Ghislaine Viñas Interior Design, New York, for Residential Interiors; Envision Design, Washington, DC, for Contract Interiors; and Allen + Philp Architects/Interiors, Scottsdale, AZ, for Contract Exteriors. All competed in their categories against a total of nearly 150 entries from around the U.S.

In previous years, the HUE Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to an architect. The 2010 honor will go for the first time to an interior design firm, Diamond Baratta Design and its principals William Diamond and Anthony Baratta, of New York City. A HUE Special Achievement Award will go to Eikona Studios, of Cleveland, OH, for its restoration and preservation of mural art and other masterpieces in churches, cathedrals and other American houses of worship.

“Benjamin Moore is proud to present HUE to another group of immensely talented and visionary architects and interior designers who have clearly demonstrated their understanding of the power, impact, emotion and vitality that color brings to our world,” said Eileen McComb, director of corporate communications for Benjamin Moore.

This year’s HUE jury included Thomas R. Krizmanic, AIA, LEED AP, a principal of STUDIOS Architecture, which was a 2008 HUE honoree; Reed Kroloff, director, Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum; Mayer Rus, design and culture editor of The Los Angeles Times Magazine; Essie Weingarten, founder and president of Essie Cosmetics, Ltd.; and, Tim Wisgerhof, former creative director at Saks Fifth Avenue and now head of his own firm, TwoSeven, Inc.