Nanette died peacefully at her Auckland home on 13 April 2023, aged 95. A celebration of her life was held at St Joseph’s Church, Great North Road, in Grey Lynn.

Amidst the glorious stained-glass windows by New Zealand modernist painter Milan Mrkusich, with Nanette’s casket painted Yves Klein Blue and bedecked with a swathe of bird of paradise flowers, friends and family recalled their experiences of knowing Nanette and how this knowing inspired and influenced their own lives. Nanette’s casket was carried from the church by her friends — members of the Nanette Cameron Interior Design Guild — and the congregation was encouraged to stand and sing along with gusto to Helen Reddy’s anthem I Am Woman.

Afterwards, a funeral wake was hosted by Objectspace, where the slideshow of Nanette’s life, compiled with a film-maker’s eye by her daughter Kirsty Cameron, triggered many memories, connections and reconnections for guests (many of whom were Nanette’s former students, spanning her 60-plus-year teaching career, with almost as many witnessing the funeral service online), as they picked up the conversation of their own Nanette experiences and connections. It was a homecoming of sorts, Objectspace being the commissioning host of the 2013 exhibition Nanette Cameron: Interior Design Legend.

The colour, the heart, the words, the music, the hospitality… the experience of attending Nanette’s funeral service was a wonderful manifestation of her life’s work. While Nanette might be known and celebrated for her achievements with architecture and design, the tangible outcomes are Te Tuhi and earlier iterations of this cultural heartland of east Auckland, the Iris Fisher Gallery and the Pakuranga Arts Society, (founded by Nanette and Iris Fisher and a group of energetic supporters). Her own home at Glenmore Road, Pakuranga, artfully and seemingly effortlessly managed to connect an example of early colonial New Zealand architecture (an old sharemilkers’ hut) with modernist architecture ideas espoused by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright. For almost 30 years, Nanette’s home was opened annually to her students as the end-of-year class visit. The Glenmore Road home was a pinnacle of what was possible when one combined intelligence and empathy, elegance and practicality, personality and playfulness over fashion and the social mores of a moment. It was a showcase, a manifesto of Nanette’s teaching.

Despite these important contributions to our built environment and her receiving the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019 at the Interior Awards, it is Nanette’s contribution as a teacher that has had the most profound impact on our lives. The fact that the Nanette Cameron Interior Design Guild (NCIDG) continues to be well subscribed to and attended by generations of graduates, long after Nanette ‘left the building’ when she retired from teaching in 2016, is testament to this. The continuing contribution of the NCIDG to the evolution of our cultural and design community through donations to community charities is further testament to Nanette’s legacy, that, collectively, through vision, tenacity and generosity, we can contribute to our cultural moment, and we can change and shape the communities we live in for the better. In the process, as individuals, we become rich through our relationships and community connections.

The publication made to accompany the exhibition Nanette Cameron: Interior Design Legend (available from Objectspace), its cover also resplendent in Nanette’s signature Yves Klein Blue, well documents her contribution as a teacher, an interior designer, a mentor and a tireless advocate for art, design and architecture being key ingredients for enriching the lives of a community. In her eulogy to her mother, Kirsty Cameron quoted one of Nanette’s favourite designers, Ettore Sottsass, on colour: “It is the history of the cosmos and of nature; it is already song, by the very fact of existing; it is dawn, sunset, fog, snow, storm; it is volcano, lightning, water, sand, forest, fire; it is infant, corpse, leopard, snake, bird of paradise…”

Haere rā Nanette.

Vivienne Stone is Director of McCahon House, an organisation of which Nanette was an ardent supporter, and she co-curated Objectspace’s Nanette Cameron: Interior Design Legend, along with Kirsty Cameron and Katie Lockhart.