Skip to main content

Kips Bay Decorator Show House

 The Kips Bay Decorator Show House is a fundraiser for a fancy Upper East Side charity that raises money for a  settlement house that provides programming for kids in Harlem. Each year they tap a select group of interior designers to decorate a big townhouse that is on the real estate market. Designers get some big deal publicity. Suppliers of high end wall paper, interior fabrics, antique dealers, drapers, carpeting companies and the like get to show off their wares. A potentially hard to sell home gets lots of foot traffic.  Thousands of people pay a fair amount of money to see all of the goodies in the house and the kids benefit from all of it. It is truly a win-win situation for everyone involved. 



My older sister may have been the person who convinced me to go the first time I went. Usually the show house is on the Upper East Side. This year for the first time it was held on the West Side. Yesterday, three friends and I went together.


You couldn't ask for a prettier location overlooking Riverside Park. I am including my own photos as well as adding photos from magazines and blogs that have also covered the house.

 


This light fixture was hanging in the entry hall.  I had mistakenly thought that it was made out of stiffened crochet doilies.  It is made out of metal but I suppose that you could create something similar out of stiffened crochet doilies and dresser scarves. Apparently it took the fabricator three months to make.


If this chandelier suddenly appeared in my dining room I would not complain.


Right off the entry foyer was a bathroom. The wallpaper is hand stenciled jute or sisal. 




Below is the mirror


The tiny bathroom feels like you are entering Maurice Sendak's illustrations from Where the Wild Things Are .

Image from galeriemagazine.com/slideshow/go-inside-2023-kips-bay-decorator-show-house-new-york/#2

 This was a room where I didn't really care for the room as a whole but I loved some of the objects in the room.






/galeriemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/2023_KB_NY_Dessins_NickSargent_01_WEB.jpg

Oddly, in person, this pale grey room creeped me out. The drapes may have been closed yesterday which changed the color of the lighting to depressing.  It looks almost charming in the photo but it is not. All of the unending grey made me feel like I was being sedated against my will.

The velvet fabric covering on the walls mimics the LOOK of books. In general books were used as props throughout the house ( Paint all of the book spines! Stack books attractively underneath heavy vases! If you own books you must be smart---but please don't read them!) 


https://assets.onekingslane.com/m/4a0365e216d70940/Super_Theme_Large-Kips-Bay-Timothy-Corrigan-NickSargent_01?wid=1066&op_sharpen=1

This room was MUCH better in real life.
It was charming, comfortable and slightly daffy.



I wonder how much this incredible hand embroidered  bug trim cost per yard? Maybe I will be lucky enough to find it in a remnant bin many years from now.






Even the rug was wonderful made of inlaid tiles of nearly identical colored rug. I don't think that this rug could have been made before the advent of laser cutting.


The custom rugs in the house were a wonder.






This rug was hand stitched jute--so beautiful!








Even rooms that I hated had lovely things within them.

https://galeriemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/2023_KB_NY_GVInteriors_NickSargent_01_WEB.jpg
















There was a pretty but impractical butler's  kitchen.



 and an similarly beautiful but impractical larger sized kitchen.


I did love the marble table and light fixture above.











https://galeriemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/2023_KB_NY_SashaBikoff_NickSargent_01_WEB.jpg
This bedroom looked like it was designed by my five year old great niece who is currently in the phase of life where everything pink and shiny is just the best thing ever. I am not at that phase of life. 



https://media.architecturaldigest.com/photos/645ab1d720e9d38d153214cd/master/w_1600,c_limit/2023_KB_NY_ProjectAZ_NickSargent_01.jpg

For me, this bathroom was just the best room in the house. The designer was inspired by the view out the window---a brick courtyard between this building and the building next door. You can see the view below.






The designer took something that in ordinary hands might seem to be kind of a negative thing and made it magical.






https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/room-22-ahmad-abouzanat-project-az-view-copy-64495419c4901.jpg?resize=980:*



There were other lovely bathrooms...




I REALLY love these tiles.













I love the tiny curated wardrobe of the imaginary inhabitants of this house.








You can look at other photos of the house at Architectural Digest, or Galerie magazine or Veranda or One Kings Lane. Some of the other reviewers loved some of the rooms that I hated, but that is what makes for horse races.



My friends and I had a great time and we followed up our time looking at pretty things with eating lunch overlooking Broadway.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl  in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born,  Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...
1 comment
Read more

Two funerals and a birthday

 I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today.  Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral  of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both  as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things.  When we were  at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...
Post a Comment
Read more

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...
2 comments
Read more