"Jamie Drake, vice chair of the show house and designer of the garden terrace, was thrown off course by an unexpected intrusion by the Department of Buildings. "A very busy-bodied neighbor filed six complaints with the NYC D.O.B., and we were issued a stop-work order!" says Drake. "It put us way behind schedule." (Ironically, his terrace, which referenced Mies van der Rohe, John Saladino and Louis Kahn was conceived as an oasis of calm.)"
"Veteran designer Vicente Wolf ran into different frustrations. "Key furnishings I counted on were sold out, fabrics were unavailable, and promised items didn't materialize," the designer says of his Peacock Room, an homage to James McNeill Whistler's famed interior. "This constant rethinking ultimately gave the room a sense of spontaneity and surprise-even for me." Other challenges came down to the inch."
"Designer Eve Robinson, who was charged with a bedroom and terrace, discovered her sectional sofa was too wide for its planned space and had to send it back to the fabricator to be cut down to fit. "The teamwork was incredible," she says. Andrea Schumacher, whose Pink Rhino Club was inspired in part by her childhood in Nigeria, echoes the necessity of teamwork: "With contractors literally working on top of each other it becomes a ballet of ladders, power tools, and patience.""
At the Kips Bay Decorator Show House's 50th anniversary, designers confronted regulatory stop-work orders, sold-out furnishings, unavailable fabrics, and mismeasured pieces while preparing for opening night. Jamie Drake received a stop-work order after neighbor complaints to the Department of Buildings, delaying his garden terrace. Vicente Wolf encountered missing and sold-out items, prompting continual rethinking of his Peacock Room. Eve Robinson had to resize a sectional; Andrea Schumacher described contractors working tightly together. The show moved downtown for the first time to a 9,000-square-foot 1900 townhouse at 20 West 12th Street, where 21 firms were given as few as eight weeks to complete spaces.
Read at Architectural Digest
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]