About
Victoria and Richard MacKenzie-Childs tickled the turn of the twentieth century with the founding of MacKenzie-Childs in 1983, which carries their name to this day. In this dream endeavor, Victoria & Richard succeeded wildly in contrast to convention, staging their ideally pastoral upstate Aurora farmhouse and former flagship store, a beacon of Madison Avenue in New York City, to shower thought and groundbreaking design upon the world. Their whimsical nature has left a legacy of adamant collectors along with an unsurpassed influence on the work and inspiration of today’s artists and designer brands.
It was in 2001 that Victoria & Richard officially stepped away from their former company of MacKenzie-Childs to begin a new Emprise, setting to sea in New York City aboard Yankee Ferry- not just their new studio afloat, but itself being their biggest masterpiece yet, and for which all profits goes toward. (Read more about Yankee's important restoration initiative and the revolutionary Mutiny Forum.)
Yankee Ferry has already served to awaken, infuse, and inspire the MacKenzie-Childsʼ new Emprise collection with a milieu of modern and historical perspectives that resound with visionary adaptations. Aboard Emprise are the iconic staples of elegant ceramic dinnerware, eclectically playful jewelry, and freewheeling furniture a constantly clever audience would expect of Victoria & Richard.
Emprise articulates the spiritual and creative prerequisites of embracing modern life, addressing our need to prevail and re-evaluate necessity whilst subject to the port and starboard sway of current times and tides. Yankee Ferry dances on the New York Harbor, resurrected and restored by Victoria & Richard and their crew through a labor of love, as was their original Aurora farmhouse, the Mecca of MacKenzie-Childs. Rescued and brought back to life, Yankee is the last remaining Ellis Island ferryboat, and serves as the landmark of Emprise. Her former passengers, our forefathers, all of whom at one time boarded her decks with an undeniably artistic notion: to step off her bow and in that moment, embrace the breaking of ties with conventions, challenge perceptions, and alter establishment with a singular idea; pursuing the art of life, their very own, imagined and lived to full fruition.
These beautiful pursuits and their fruits linger for all to inherit and serve as the remarkable beginnings of Emprise aboard, a new chivalrous venture of Victoria & Richard MacKenzie-Childs.