MacKenzie-Childs home decor brand founder Victoria MacKenzie-Childs is dead at 77.
Her brother announced on Facebook that his sister died Wednesday morning.
“I’m sad and sorry to see you, Victoria, my Sister go!” Donnie Mackenzie wrote.
Her cause of death wasn’t mentioned.
“I say sad for all of us whom loved Victoria so much, but we know she continues to live life with so much vigor, creativity and enthusiasm!” Mackenzie added. “I already miss you so much, but am so grateful for the impressions you left on me on how to design life with unlimited freedom; without limits or boundaries!”
Syracuse station CNY Central said MacKenzie-Childs and her husband Richard Mackenzie-Childs started their company in upstate Cayuga County back in 1983 before losing the business to bankruptcy in 2001.
The couple’s children, Heather and Niels, released a video on YouTube last month showing a boat named The Yankee Ferry that their parents turned into a well-appointed floating home and studio in 2004.
“She always loved New York with all the layers of texture and people and cultures coming together, but she couldn’t find how to be there with lots of space to work and had this idea of wanting to be on a boat,” Heather explains. “It was just an extraordinary way of living in Manhattan, but feeling almost like you’re, you know, out at sea.”
MacKenzie-Childs explained in an Instagram video that she spotted the boat — a former Ellis Island ferry — while rollerblading around Manhattan and checked it out.
“This gnarly guy came and he gave me a price and it was really cheap, so I said it’s a deal,” she recalled.
The Yankee Ferry was put on the real estate market last summer. It was docked in Staten Island at the time and listed for $1.25 million.
MacKenzie-Childs said her company employed 400 people before it was lost to an “unfair, powerful situation.”
