Master of cloisonne with modern and stylish touch

At an event in New York recently, acclaimed Manhattan decorator Diana Vinoly approached Robert Kuo and thanked him for the exceptional pieces he had created for her clients, singer Beyonce and her rapper husband Jay Z. Kuo smiled and nodded appreciatively.

"He didn't actually know who they were," said Karen Kuo Chou, Kuo's daughter, who works with him alongside her sister Chin-chin. "I had to point Beyonce out later to my father in a television commercial."

That low-key demeanour is typical of Kuo, a sought-after designer of furniture and home accessories whose dramatic pieces are owned by the likes of Jennifer Lopez and Will Smith, as well as luxury hotels worldwide, including the Grand Hyatt in Hong Kong and the Ritz-Carlton in Beijing.

Kuo is known for taking the traditions of cloisonne - the ancient technique using enamel to decorate metalwork - and rendering them in strikingly modern ways. His finesse with repousse - metal hammered into relief from the reverse side - is evident in the intriguingly textured bowls on display in his showrooms in Los Angeles and New York, the latter of which opened in 2007.

Kuo is in the throes of a three-decade bicoastal retrospective of his work. His Los Angeles showroom is 30 years old this year, so he recently held a week-long event at the nearby Pacific Design Centre to showcase his work in the past three decades. The exhibition opened in New York on Monday and will run for two weeks.

Although Kuo remains as active as ever, he says that over the past 30 years, his work has evolved such that decorators and private clients ask increasingly for his larger, substantial pieces rather than his smaller ones, opting for a chest of drawers instead of a side table, say, or a hefty coffee table rather than a vase. That is despite his beginning his career making accent pieces.