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Let’s face it, the whole point of
a show house is an exercise in masochism and self-loathing – about
your own apartment’s inadequacies. To see all those beautiful
rooms, immaculate and perfect, is to realize why Madonna said her
most favorite part of the day was when the maid had just finished:
Everything’s right with the world. Not a speck of dust or Manhattan
grime to be found, everything’s shiny and new.
To wander through the rooms of 4
East 75th Street, the site of this year’s Kips Bay
Decorator Show House, is no exception: these are rooms which inspire
flights of fancy and visions of romance. These rooms are the
repositories of the one true New York fantasy: real estate. And
just as soon as we get our penthouse in the sky, this is how we’ll
be living.
Here, in alphabetical order, are
our five favorite rooms in this year’s Kips Bay Decorator Show
House.
Thom Filicia, Inc., Modern Times:
An immensely long room overlooking the garden, this is a
naturalist’s sanctuary of earth tones and stone and natural
materials. An ornithologist’s haven with eagle pedestals. Here
lives a connoisseur of the outdoors and a collector of the visual
artists who bring the best of the natural world in. A room
remarkably void of capitalism’s more incessant distractions, it
would appear that the most modern are those who focus on the world
outside.
Larry Laslo Designs, What
Is...Black, White, and Suite/Vanity Fair:
A Hollywood master bedroom from the silver screen’s most elegant
eras. Art Deco marble sculptures and a 1940 mahogany desk and
chair, a George III leather chair, and Giacometti twig tables – and
on the floor, wall to wall goat’s hair in white. Sumptuous and
soothing. Lest you feel bound to the Forties, there’s also a 50”
plasma flat HDTV above the Gio Ponti Modernist cabinet. Ensuite,
the bathroom with Kohler’s masterful hatbox toilet. Who wouldn’t
wish to wake in this room every morning for the rest of life?
Richard Mishaan Design, The Great
Room: With its calming
palette of brown, beige and blue, this is the room where you fully
expect to encounter Babe Paley cocktailing with Capote and Cocteau.
An oasis away from the maelstrom of Manhattan, the perfect antidote
to traffic and stress. An elegant and oversized silver-plated
chandelier hovers above Deco sofas and Normandy chairs. This is the
room where we happily return to decompress.
Katherine Newman Design, The
Living Room: Larger
than the majority of Manhattan apartments, this living room has
seating areas for no less than eight individual groups of chattering
magpies, along with a dining table set for eight. This is where
Barry Lyndon and his entourage might convene should they find
themselves in 2006. And yet with room enough for forty or more,
this room still possesses niches for intimacy and secrets. A room
for the gloaming hour, cocktails and after-dinner drinks, the sort
of room which keeps you long after your bedtime.
Campion Platt, Mr.
Woo’s Lab:
When you need to be alone, when you need to work, when you need to
create and be inspired, this is the room to which you retire. With
ambient lighting and surround sound, and not one but four recessed
plasma screen televisions, and a Pullman-car-like enclosure, perfect
for reclining and more, and a clear acrylic desk, streamlined and
moderne, it’s hardly noticeable there’s no window, for everything
here is generated from deep within the creative mind and soul.
Look for me in the lab, indeed.
Best always,
Mark and Robert
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