Road to Kips Bay

It's the Olympics of Interior Design, and I'm here as your Bob Costas AND your Kristi Yamaguchi - join me as the MiniMag heads to Palm Beach!

This month I’m breaking down the saga of making a Kips Bay Showcase room. For those of you who are unfamiliar a Showcase is a mansion (usually on the market or about to be) where each room is given to a different designer with almost no limits to what they can do. People pay to come visit, and all the money goes to charity. Kips Bay makes it rain for Boy’s and Girl’s Club, and is the most prestigious Showcase house in America - some of the best most exciting spaces I’ve ever seen have been in Kips Bay, and now we are adding our own room - a real banger called The Peony Pavilion - to the cannon. My own emotional journey has been all over the map: I went from skeptical to scared to confident to electrically excited, and now I’m whatever is on the other side of that: buoyantly numb? It’s great.

Timeline-wise, we were offered the opportunity to participate right before Thanksgiving. The completion date was Valentine’s Day, and, a bit about this industry, we are not a people who work through the holidays. There is no such thing as a contractor or a wallpaper installer or a designer who is getting back to you with estimates in the second half of December, so… in many ways it was first idea best idea.

The biggest idea was to tent our room in our very own fabric, and to time the opening of this room with the birth of our product and fabric line: RAD Goods. For ten years I’ve mumbled about “licensing” and “product” and was just sort of waiting for something to happen. Then last summer I decided to stop waiting. I painted and took a surface pattern class and now our first fabric, Peony Chintz is done and you are (scroll scroll scroll) looking at 340 yards of it. What’s more, our first piece of furniture - The Lucia Game Table - is done and you’re looking at her too! They’re both designed in-house and gorgeously made in America to our impeccable standards. They’re both for sale on our very own DTC website where you can ApplePay the entire Kips Bay room if you like (a mere $250K including installation!), or just order a swatch for $8. It all feels very exciting and GeorgeW Mission Accomplished and I guess it’s just like my lower back tattoo says in incredible script with some indiscernible characters thrown in: Nothing like an opportunity and a deadline and an incredible team to make dreams come true.

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WHAT EVEN IS THIS

Our room is the loggia, open on one side to a lap pool with a 14’ ceiling. We had approximately eight days to design everything, and with approximately zero architectural features to inspire us we decided to go big towards fantasy and just tent the entire thing.

The words I used to describe the before condition were “like the inside of a clean microwave.” It was grim, my friends!

Photo montage of the process, n.b. the tropical flight suits, the friendly but all-business demeanor of Anel and Veronica, the details coming out perfectly, the picture of a board and how it actually happens

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STYLE GUIDE TO REALITY

The devoted reader may remember I create a document at the beginning of each project that gives us a North Star. This one was fun and personal: after we decided this was going to be a very chill reading and game loggia and there would be chintz and cards and a bar, it was clear to me there was one person who would love it - my Grandma Lucia. She wintered in Florida for decades (my parents got engaged at The Breakers in 1976!), gardened her balls off, taught me what Brunschwig et Fils was when I was a teenager, and oversaw more than a million games of Gin Rummy 500. Thus, the Peony Pavilion was born, and we started padding it out with a bar and a sofa literally named the “napper”. To make sure it wasn’t overly nostalgic I added the spirit of Sofia Coppola who I think would also appreciate this fully shaded paradise.

INSPIRATION: Sofia Coppola x my Grandmother at The Breakers in 1976

The hero of our room is Lucia McGregor who loved Palm Beach, cards and having a drink. We gave her an imaginary daughter Sofia and this is her loggia // Like her mother she loves playing cards, having a drink, smoking a cigarette // Sofia is busy at her writing desk during the morning and by night she’s out on the town // She got engaged at The Breakers, very exciting! // Sofia loves swimming and chatting with her hottie friends

Recreation, babiezzzz

Green // It’s the color of money, it’s the color of Sofia’s outdoor grass tennis court, it’s perfect for an indoor/outdoor room // Plants, but modern. Jonas Wood plants! // A perfect room to hide in if you are starring in 1998 Great Expectations

Not to sound like a monster but this is perfect

A good chintz signifies confidence, femininity, and an appreciation of beauty. // Layering florals with other florals and then adding more patterns shows you really mean it with that confidence

Speaking of confident, our room will not be tied to a monochrome palette. // We will dabble in red and orange and turbans

Mischief in the details // Our imaginary Sofia appreciates a handwritten note, a charm bracelet, and has many collections of odd and beautiful ephemera. // She hides cigarettes in the pencil drawer and is working on a book called April Fool’s Day Pranks for Bored Moms

What is this group's appetite for every single photo? I case it is as voracious as mine here are the rest.

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This will go down as one of my favorite career moments of all time. So proud of the RAD Team: Anel Clay, Veronica Aguilar, Judy Kail and Mr. Andrew Casual. Thank you to Steele Marcoux for tapping me, and to Amy Harper for the nudge and the follow-through; Photos: Nick Sargent; Clutch long distance styling support: Yedda Morrison

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And now, my favorite way to digest information:

GoBuild Studio; Smink Studio; Primestones, Creation Marble; Mirth Studio; Casa Gusto

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I promised gossip and intrigue, and those of you who have plowed through the “post too long for email” cutoff now get to hear the drama of opening day at Kips Bay. It started at 10:30am, tense-as-hell because the designer of the dining room refused to speak to the designer of the living room because of a curtain that blocked a sightline (gasp). We took a group photo in which the designer of one of the bathrooms refused for five minutes to sit down because it was unflattering. Another designer showed up with morning side-boob and a pregnancy bump and I realized this was the saltiest group of people I have ever been with and I loved them all.

Fast forward 10 warm hours in which Amy (my PR and Marketing person) and I have been sustaining ourselves on bubbly water and catering, meeting people and fielding tax advice from felons.

Him: “I just got out of jail and I think you should write off all this as a donation to a non-profit” Me: “I’ll look into that.”

It became clear by the end of the night that both Amy and I had gotten food poisoning. We suffered, but only one of us had to fly back to California feeling like they were going to die (so sorry, Amy). I rallied 2 days later and the only thing giving me energy was that I wanted to learn who else got sick. Was it a full-on gala poisoning? Would the CDC be getting involved? Turns out NO ONE ELSE got sick. No one else ate. One of them said “I make it a policy not to eat ahi that’s been sitting out in the sun for hours.” And I realized I still have so much to learn in this life.

Thanks for reading, if you have it in you I love a comment. Even a dumb one.

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Last Word: A nip of my omnivore’s book club where I never tag the author because I like to let ’er rip on all books great and sleazy. Almost 150 book reviews of all flavors saved in stories