| EVE ROBINSON/Eye of Design by Susanna Salk
“We like to take a traditional idea and make it modern,” says the tall, Prada-outfitted Eve Robinson of her 21-year-old New York design firm. A graduate of Vassar College, where she studied art history, and Parsons School of Design, Robinson, a mother of two boys (ages 16 and 12), nurtures both her work life and her family life with equal style and efficiency.
Robinson was first turned on to the art of styling a room when she moonlighted as an assistant for Victoria Hagan while attending Parsons in the late ’80s. “I hit the jackpot working for Victoria and her late partner Simone Feldman,” says Robinson. “The way they combined traditional elements with modern ones allowed me to see and experience design in a way I never had before.” Robinson’s own aesthetic takes root in the frequent trips she took with her mother to a wallpaper store in the Riverdale, New York, neighborhood where she grew up. “The sight of floral repeats and the smell of the plasticized paper sent me into an impatient tizzy,” says Robinson, who today delights in spending her days trolling showrooms for wallpapers, just of a more textured and modern variety. It was actually a wall treatment that helped put Robinson on the design map when, at the 1998 Kips Bay Designer Show House, she transformed an unprepossessing sitting room on the Upper East Side into a unique haven by covering the walls with quarter-inch strips of maple woven together so that the wall appeared to be covered in a giant basket weave. “I wanted to transform the space by taking a familiar pattern and making it into something large and tactile,” says Robinson.
Five more show houses have followed, with Robinson thriving under the intense deadlines and stress. “Victoria Hagan was working on a show house in Connecticut when I was her assistant and I saw the importance of striking that balance between being innovative but not so outlandish that people couldn’t relate to the room,” says Robinson, whose most recently did Kips Bay in 2010, where she in a traditional kitchen she installed a lime-green back-painted glass backsplash and a lacquer-green desk to give the space a clean and glamorous edge.
Robinson also infuses her clients’ homes with glamorous details. A Manhattan townhouse, for example, was given new life when she restored the plaster ceiling based on methods traditionally used in prewar apartment ceilings. “The modern twist,” explains Robinson, “came from using stucco veneziano, a wax process that is troweled on the wall. The wax was manipulated to create a large circle and spoke pattern in matte and glossy finishes. The result was a beautiful, subtle pattern on the ceiling that was light and ethereal.”
Often at Robinson’s side — they work on projects together several times a year — is her husband Josh Wiener, owner and president of Silverlining Interiors, a general contracting firm based in New York. “Eve’s decisiveness moves projects along quickly,” says Wiener. One of their first collaborations was on their own Upper West Side apartment, which was spotlighted in a 1995 issue of House Beautiful. (ITAL) “It was your classic six; a traditional space in desperate need of a makeover when we bought it in 1992,” says Robinson. The husband and wife team turned rooms into lush examples of glamour and comfort: the dining room has stained ebony wainscoting that is a backdrop for a collection of black-and-white Robert Mapplethorpe photos; Robinson paired modern Donghia chairs with a circular 1850s American Empire dining table. “My design style has not changed greatly since I started my firm twenty-one years ago,” she says. “I strongly believe in choosing elements that will have longevity and will not go out of style.”
This theory is applied to all clients — no matter if they sleep in a nursery or favor Neutra. In fact, Robinson has long been a go-to designer of children’s rooms that don’t feel too childish, especially when tight city living gives very little in the way of space. “One thing that really appeals to clients who have kids is that I have kids myself,” says Robinson. For one New York family, she fashioned a bedroom as though it was the Orient express, with four bunk beds lining the walls. Each bunk has its own curtains, which create cozy sleeping compartments — complete with pockets for books and a painted Manhattan skyline around its perimeter. “Kids will be living in their room for at least eighteen years,” she says. “It’s so important that it lasts!”
Memories of her own childhood bedroom still play an active role in Robinson’s designs. “I have vivid memories of sitting in my room as a child and drawing the shapes of the shadows on the different planes of the walls, floor, and ceiling,” recalls Robinson. “I loved seeing how the architecture of the room came to life through the interplay of light and dark shadows, and how they infused the room with depth and perspective. As an adult, I continue to be fascinated by the changing role of light in interiors, and how it affects the environment.”
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