Laura Park and her daughter, Sumner Park Schietinger, bring beauty to the everyday, creating pieces that elevate gatherings, spark joy, and make room for the moments that matter.
Story by Cara Clark, Photos by Olly Young
At the heart of every beautifully set table is a story — one shaped by place, memory, family, and, ultimately, the people gathered around it. For artist and designer Laura Park and her daughter, Sumner Park, creating beautiful spaces has always been about something deeper than aesthetics. It is about the art of making connections, of surrounding themselves with things that hold meaning, and of turning ordinary moments into memories worth keeping.
For Laura, abstract paintings and signature patterns became the foundation of the lifestyle and home décor line, Laura Park Designs, in a story that began decades ago through a childhood surrounded by art, textiles, and the magic of color. Her path into design unfolded naturally, beginning with the influence of her beloved grandmother, continuing through years of collecting and studying beautiful objects, and eventually leading Laura to discover her own artistic voice.
Where a Love of Color Began
Long before Laura began creating collections of her own, she was learning to see the world through the eyes of an artist. Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, she spent many weekends traveling a hundred miles west to Lexington, North Carolina, to visit her grandmother, whose creative life would leave an indelible impression on her.
“My grandmother was an artist, a painter,” Laura recalls. “She also sewed, so she made a lot of my mom’s clothes growing up.”
Those visits opened the door to a world of color, craftsmanship, and possibility. Lexington, with its deep history of furniture and textile production, offered an especially rich backdrop. There were fabric shops to explore, patterns to discover, and seemingly endless combinations of texture and color to take in.
“I was always around a lot of color in her studio,” Laura says. “I just loved going to the fabric stores with her.”
Some of the artist’s most vivid memories are tied to those trips. She remembers wandering through fabric stores and collecting the scraps clipped from inspiring bolts of cottons and blends, instinctively recognizing beauty in the smallest remnants.
“I remember one where they would cut samples, and whatever fell to the floor, I would pick up and bring home and make into little quilts for my dolls,” she says. “I always have just loved fabric and color, and I think I probably got that from my grandmother.”
Her early fascination with textiles would become part of Laura’s visual vocabulary long before she thought of herself as an artist. Without realizing it, she was learning that color could evoke emotion, transform a room, and give even the simplest object a sense of place.
Years later, after opening a small retail store and spending weekends searching for paintings, furniture, and textiles to bring into the space, Laura began to wonder if she might create artwork of her own. It was a deeply personal moment that ultimately set that idea in motion: the unexpected loss of her father.
“My dad died suddenly,” Laura says. “I don’t know what it was, but something in me just decided I was going to learn how to paint.”
With encouragement from her artist husband, Trip Park, Laura began experimenting with paint. What started as an instinct soon revealed itself to be a natural language.
“I’m not a great painter,” she says with characteristic humility. “I think I’m more of a colorist, and I love putting the colors together in an abstract way.”
That instinct — the ability to combine unexpected shades, balance warmth and contrast, and create harmony through color — would become one of the defining signatures of her work.
Inspired by Places, Woven into Patterns
If Laura’s earliest inspiration came from fabric shops and her grandmother’s studio, travel became another kind of classroom — one where architecture, gardens, culture, and landscape offered an ever-changing palette. She has learned to see each destination as both a place to visit and as a source of visual language.
“I love to travel,” Laura says. “I think a lot of inspiration comes from traveling. We’ve been to India, France, England, and all over Europe, and I get a lot of inspiration from architecture and gardens and culture.”
As a designer, she is less interested in replicating what she sees than in translating it through her own perspective. A garden might inspire a particular combination of hues; an architectural detail might suggest a shape; a photograph might later become the starting point for an abstract composition.
“I love to take pictures and come back to look through them and remember what inspired me,” she explains. “A lot of times when I’m painting, I’ll go back and look at my photos and see how color works together.”
That way of gathering inspiration by absorbing a place and then reimagining it is at the heart of her collections. It is also what inspired her newest Cotswold Collection, named for the English countryside that has long captured her imagination.
“I think that trip to England inspired some of the colors I was using at the time, and it was just a natural fit to call it Cotswold,” Laura says.
The collection evokes the quieter beauty of the landscape: garden blooms, softened tones, historic architecture, and the layered colors found throughout the countryside. One pattern, Bloomsbury, grew from floral impressions Laura gathered during her travels, transforming photographs and memories into an entirely new visual vocabulary.
In that sense, each collection of patterns is a record of where Laura has been, what she has noticed, and, most importantly, how observation becomes art.
Growing Up Inside the Creative Process
For Sumner, that way of seeing was never something she had to learn from the outside. Creativity was threaded through everyday life in the Park household. Paintings hung in the studio, and daubs of color were bright with promise. Throughout the home, rooms shifted and evolved as Laura experimented with new arrangements, colors, and ideas. Both of Sumner’s parents were artists, making the creative process feel less like a career choice and more like a natural part of living.
“Creativity was just a part of my life every single day between both my mom and my dad, who was an artist himself,” Sumner says. “I always saw paintings drying, and there was fabric thrown around. My mom was always rearranging the pillows and the tables and changing the wallpaper.”
It was much later when Sumner understood just how unusual that upbringing was.
“Our home had so many different versions of it, and it evolved over time, but it was always very beautiful,” she says. “I really didn’t realize how unique that environment was until I got older.”
Her own career initially took a different direction. Sumner pursued journalism, eventually working as a producer and reporter, and the instinct to tell stories never left her. Over time, she began to recognize that beautiful spaces offered another medium for storytelling.
“I love storytelling in beautiful spaces,” she says. “I’ve learned so much watching (my parents) pursue their own passions.”
While Sumner had grown up watching her mother create, she also witnessed firsthand the uncertainty and persistence required to turn an idea into a business. She remembers the first market show for Laura Park Designs as a particularly telling moment.
“I look back to the first market show, and it was incredibly scrappy,” Sumner recalls. “I remember the first night we went to dinner, and my mom had a breakdown. She was like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. We don’t have anybody coming by.’”
Sumner’s response was simple: keep going.
“I told her just to keep doing it,” she says. “You’re so new to this.”
That early leap of faith would become a defining chapter in the Laura Park Designs story. What began with a small booth and plenty of uncertainty eventually grew into a nationally recognized lifestyle brand — and, for Sumner, offered a blueprint for building something of her own.
Setting the Table for the Next Chapter
As Sumner spent more time alongside her mother — traveling to markets, helping with product development, and learning how to bring an idea from sketch to finished piece — she began to imagine how she could contribute to the family’s creative language in her own way.
That vision became Sumner Edit, a tabletop collection grounded in storytelling, thoughtful entertaining, and the belief that gathering around a table can be just as meaningful as the meal itself.
“I think having spent so much time alongside my mom going to markets, helping her with product development, and having to use resourcefulness to find developers and manufacturers really inspired me,” Sumner says.
One experience in particular helped shape that vision. A trip to India with Laura allowed Sumner to see the creative process at its source — to witness the craftsmanship, materials, and people behind the pieces she had previously encountered only as finished products.
“It was incredible to see it all firsthand and see how the pieces came to life,” she says.
That experience helped Sumner envision a collection that could build upon her mother’s work, while establishing a distinct point of view of its own. Then came another deeply personal source of inspiration: her wedding. The ceremony was followed by a reception at The Gasparilla Inn in Boca Grande, Florida, where coral and shades of blue borrowed from the ocean came together like a perfect sunset.
“My wedding really became the launching point for Sumner Edit,” she says.
For the celebration, mother and daughter reimagined one of Laura’s original patterns, Sarafina, translating it into a tabletop piece that could become part of the gathering itself.
“We designed the Sarafina dessert plate,” Sumner explains. “It was my mom’s print that I wanted to repurpose onto a dessert plate for the table.”
The pattern appeared throughout the wedding design in linens, wallpaper, and decorative details, creating a visual thread that connected the different elements of the celebration. Those same elements were styled into cosmetic bags, tablecloths, and even Christmas trees in a Gasparilla-inspired line called Sumner + Grant’s Wedding.
“To me, that was just so gratifying,” Sumner says. “Being able to see all the closest people in my life come together and just appreciate all the beauty.”
The goal of making a table feel personal, not simply look beautiful — layered with details that invite people to linger, connect, and remember—remains central to Sumner Edit.
“I think Edit refers to what I do exactly,” Sumner says. “I’m editing stories professionally, and I approach entertaining the same way.”
In her hands, a table becomes its own kind of composition: colors, textures, objects, and memories carefully selected and arranged until they tell a story together.
One Family, Multiple Creative Directions
The spirit of collaboration extends beyond mother and daughter. The Park family’s creative legacy continues through Laura’s other daughter, Lawson, whose apparel line, Brooks Avenue, incorporates elements of the family’s artistic heritage, while developing a visual identity of its own.
At the center of that heritage is Laura’s extensive archive of patterns — a living library of colors, motifs, and ideas that the sisters can reinterpret in entirely new ways.
“We get to have this database of beautiful patterns, whether it’s the archives or patterns my mom is working on,” Sumner says. “We’re always kind of collaborating and putting together the colors and the shapes and motifs.”
What begins as one of Laura’s original designs can take on an entirely different life in her daughters’ hands. For Laura, watching that evolution is one of the most rewarding parts of the creative process. Her work may have been the beginning, but it does not have to be the ending.
“I love to see what we can do with it, and everybody’s different take on it, especially Sumner and Lawson,” she says.
Sometimes, the reinterpretations even surprise the original artist.
“Lawson will take one of my patterns and recolor it,” Laura says. “Sometimes I like her version a lot better.”
It’s an admission filled with warmth and a shared appreciation of beauty. It also speaks to Laura’s joy in watching her daughters’ talents and the new ideas they bring to the table, literally and figuratively. It’s a sense of freedom to let an idea evolve beyond its original form.
“It’s so fun having my girls involved with me,” Laura says. “Seeing them grow into what they love.”
For the Parks, design is more than a profession. It is a shared language — one passed between generations, transformed along the way, and made more personal with every new interpretation.
Where Memory Meets the Garden
A sense of history, collaboration, and place came together beautifully at Duke Mansion, where the Park family created two fall tablescapes for Magnolia & Moonshine — designed around gathering, hospitality, and the quiet beauty of a changing season.
The setting was more than simply picturesque. It was personal.
Located in Charlotte, close to the Laura Park Designs headquarters, the Duke Mansion also carries special memories for Sumner. It was a place she knew long before she ever imagined creating a table there.
“When my dad’s mom would come to Charlotte, that’s where she wanted to stay,” Sumner says. “I would always stay overnight with her, and we walked through the gardens together.”
For the Park family, the gardens offered a natural extension of the philosophy that has shaped their work for years: that beauty becomes more meaningful when it is connected to memory and place.
Laura’s Cotswold Collection provided the visual foundation, bringing together colors and textures inspired by her travels through England. Against the historic architecture and lush gardens of the Duke Mansion, the collection felt at once transported and completely at home.
“We thought it was a natural fit,” Laura says. “The Duke Mansion is right in our backyard, so we get to walk past the beautiful gardens every day.”
The tablescape takes a softer approach to autumn, moving beyond traditional seasonal hues and instead layering gentle neutrals with unexpected bursts of color.
“We wanted to do a softer interpretation of autumn,” Sumner explains. “Layering softer colors together with some bright pops and showcasing that in the setting of the beautiful gardens of the Duke Mansion.”
The result is an elegant and approachable celebration: white pumpkins, warm rust tones, and Carolina charm.
