September 27, 2026The first thing to know about this year’s Kips Bay Decorator Show House is that somebody’s been smoking.
Not actually smoking, presumably. But loose cigarettes appear on bathroom counters; vintage ashtrays turn up in lounges; matchboxes are everywhere, many free for the taking. There are Marlboro collectibles, snuffed-out butts and even a space conceived as a smoking room. In an era when restaurants and bars have largely stopped handing out matchboxes, it feels almost subversive to be filling one’s jacket pockets with them again.
Then there is the pervasive palette of rust, burnt orange, earthy red and dusty pink: the hues of terracotta, old leather, dried tobacco and things left to warm in the sun. Across the six floors of an 1839 Greenwich Village townhouse at 80 Washington Place, nearly two dozen designers have produced rooms that are less about pristine perfection than personality, ritual and the seductive accumulation of stuff.
The brief seems to be a collective permission slip to make the house feel inhabited, often with a time-warp effect.
The presumed resident becomes literal (and literary) in Chad Dorsey’s Editor’s Apartment. The editor in question has seemingly just stepped away from his desk — perhaps for a walk around the block to clear his head and enjoy a smoke — sometime around 1960.
“The editor works late into the night,” Dorsey says of his character. There are piles of National Geographic magazines, half-finished letters, charcoal drawings and spent cigarettes in ashtrays, accompanied by jazz playing on the hi-fi and two finches chirping from a beautiful vintage cage.
“One of them escaped by squeezing through the bars during installation,” Dorsey confides. The songbird was quickly retrieved and returned to his friend.
The desk is actually a Hans Wegner drop-leaf table, produced by Andreas Tuck in teak and oak with brass hardware and sourced through Hostler Burrows. Around it, Josef Frank occasional tables and a credenza mingle with glazed stoneware, a ceramic bull and assorted architectural drawings, vintage photographs and bronze objects. A Wegner Papa Bear chair, from Sputnik Modern, creates a reading corner, while a custom Kyle Bunting hide rug gives all the collected objects a place to land.
The smoking theme reaches its fullest expression in Andrew Torrey’s Le Fumoir. “I’m not a smoker,” says Torrey, who serves as the vice chair of the showhouse this year. Rather, he’s nodding to the bygone cigarette culture, with a giant box of Marlboro Reds and canvases by the street artist Robert Loughlin, known for his chisel-jawed smoking man.
Other standout objects in the street-facing space include ceremonial African masks and figurative sculptures, plus a cowhide LC4 chaise lounge by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand that Torrey picked up on 1stDibs. “Most everything came from my own collection,” he says. “I collect what consumes me.”
The result is a retreat that feels like a fragment of the designer’s own world, with carpeting in a bold red that coordinates with the cover of his recent monograph, Torrey: Private Spaces, which Rizzoli published last year. The matchboxes he’s giving away are miniature versions of the book.
Matches are also available in Erik Gensler‘s After Dark lounge, Nicole Fisher’s rooftop and Tyler Banken’s garden. Banken’s white-and-green boxes display horticultural jokes one actually wants to steal: “I wet my plants” and “Rooting for you!” The matchbox, suddenly, is back where it belongs — not merely as a token souvenir but as a solid piece of graphic design.
Banken took a previously dark terrace and brightened it with pale pavers and heaps of green, including on the pergola, which is adorned with a Greek-key motif inspired, he says, “by the Washington Square Arch down the street.”
A green-and-white mosaic on the back wall incorporates 50 stars and 13 stripes (not in the shape of a flag), a nod to John Philip Sousa, composer of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and the townhouse’s first occupant. The patio’s cooking zone is an unexpected shade of light sage. “Where else can I do a green outdoor kitchen besides Kips Bay?” Banken asks.
On the roof, Fisher created another version of the outdoor room: an urban oasis with a bar canopied by a tasseled Zoffany fabric that matches the rosé being served. A Baccarat chandelier and table lamps shower the bar with a crystalline radiance at night.
“We’re bringing the inside out,” the designer explains. The most charming object is, of course, a 1stDibs find: a vintage ceramic stool whose seat is in the form of a lily pad. “It’s our favorite piece,” Fisher says.
Erik Gensler brings even more indoors out (or is it outdoors in?). His After Dark aerie, although initially appearing to be a deeply atmospheric interior, “is actually a terrace,” he says. “You’re in a tent.”
Inspired by the 1970s magazine After Dark, the space feels like a louche basement lounge from 50 years ago, furnished with animal prints, art depicting muscular male forms, vintage ashtrays and such plush preowned pieces as a 1920s Art Deco rug, a 1970s Giovanni Offredi Onda lounger and a Joe Colombo Elda chair. Archival copies of the magazine are available to take away, completing the fantasy.
Kylie K. Bass, of KKB Interiors, took a rosier approach to her space, a bedroom she describes as a “love letter to my daughter — and to antiques.” The ornate suite, with an attached bathroom and reading nook, is wrapped in a dusty pink that Bass worries may be too grown-up for her six-and-a-half-year-old daughter, who already calls it “my room.”
The furnishings continue the young girl’s sophisticated dream theme. An ornate white iron bed twirls into delicate curves, while Art Nouveau–style cutouts and elaborate millwork overhead give the room a coffered feeling without dropping the ceiling.
Floral motifs proliferate across the bedding, drapes, pillows and carpeting, but the theme receives its most overt translation in the lighting: A flower-like floor lamp and a glass-bouquet chandelier seem to have sprouted among the feminine decor. An Italian bookcase, commissioned by Bass from a seller on 1stDibs, adds another layer of old-world charm.
Emily Del Bello’s space, titled In Bloom, is a jewel-box powder room in which Parisian romance takes a slightly mischievous turn. The first thing to notice is the sink: Its crafty basin, carved from the same expressive Calacatta Viola marble that clads the lower walls, looks almost impossibly shallow. “It’s a working sink,” Del Bello insists. “I’d show you if the water was turned on in here.”
The custom bronzed vanity curves gracefully beneath the sink, while above it a hand-painted wallcovering sends delicate flowered stems winding around the room. An antiqued-glass mirror continues the botanical theme with gilded branches and magnolia blossoms. And a stack of slim cigarettes provides a sly reminder of one of this year’s Kips Bay obsessions.
Carrier and Company’s blue dressing room represents a more fashion-conscious take. Its starting point was the exuberant mix of patterns in the firm’s new Lee Jofa textile collaboration. The result is a mad collision of motifs that somehow still feels soothing.
The firm’s co-owner Mara Miller describes her design as “soft and feminine,” with a blackened-steel vanity by J.M. Szymanski providing “a masculine counterpoint.” Next to that piece is an iconic Ico Parisi valet, reminding us the space is, in fact, a dressing room.
A Lee Jofa Oleander ottoman, resembling three pillows stacked at right angles to one another and upholstered in one of the new Carrier and Company florals, is the room’s standout piece. Above, hand-blown glass discs by Andreea Avram Rusu turn the ceiling into a light sculpture installation. These are echoed by a gleaming set of mid-century Diamante-cut Murano-glass vessels from Liz O’Brien.
Megan Grehl’s adjoining bathroom goes in the opposite direction. It is a symphony of rouge Italian Breccia Pernice marble, deployed in epic custom stonework inspired by the sci-fi Dune saga, with a trough running from the sink to the deep bathtub. Grehl terms the look both “classical and futuristic.” The cool blues of Carrier and Company’s dressing room and this bathroom’s warm-toned stone create a particularly satisfying collision of eras and atmospheres.
John Ferguson pushes the tension between hard and soft into something almost atmospheric in his primary bedroom. Here a Rogan Gregory pendant from R & Company hovers over a bespoke Dune canopy bed like a small weather event. “It’s an ethereal, cloudlike form dropped in the middle of the bed,” Ferguson says.
A custom silk-and-wool Edward Fields rug in brick red gridded with glimmering pewter fibers covers the floor, while the ceiling is clad in Phillip Jeffries grasscloth cut from a single colorway and arranged in a checkerboard pattern that seems to shift as the light — and the visitor — moves.
Reminding us that we’re in the room of the New Connoisseur, as Ferguson dubbed his space, are a 1988 marsh-straw prototype S chair by Tom Dixon from Maison Gerard; a small 1908 photograph by Constantin Brancusi, from Lincoln Glenn Gallery; and 1960s Murano-glass wall lights by J.T. Kalmar, sourced through 1stDibs.
A mid-century leather-wrapped desk from Newel and a 1972 Paul Evans cabinet, from Milord Antiques, double as nightstands, topped with Christopher Spitzmiller lamps sporting orange shades.
The autumn hues that characterize and unify the showhouse reach peak season in Ten Plus Three’s mezzanine, with its treescape mural made from various interlocking wood cutouts, custom Tai Ping rug composed of puffy pixels in 1970s earth tones and pair of swooping Sergio Rodrigues lounge chairs in smooth cognac leather from R & Company.
Celeste Robbins of Robbins Architecture takes an atmospheric tack in the primary bath, named Kasumi, Japanese for “mist.” What initially seems a limitation — the lack of windows — gives rise to the space’s defining conceit. Behind a translucent alpaca-and-bamboo screen, cherry blossom branches appear and dissolve in shifting light, as though glimpsed through spring fog in Kyoto.
Even the vanity plays along, its thick cast-glass surround turning the Breccia Fantastica marble within into something that seems to float: part stone, part lantern.
Peter Dunham’s city-facing guest bedroom is swathed in Jacob’s Stripe — Dunham’s new rainbow-striped linen — and hung with works by queer Southern California artists, including a black-and-white Catherine Opie self-portrait and Dunham’s own collage by the late David Hockney.
“I wanted to represent Los Angeles in New York,” he says. “If the showhouse were in L.A., I’d do it the other way around and show all New York artists.” The allusion is both geographic and autobiographical: “This is my dream Village apartment. I wanted this to be my little pied-à-terre.”
Also mining a West Coast vein, Marmol Radziner brings Los Angeles modernism into the townhouse with a dining room organized around a tapering oval red-oak table made in the firm’s woodshop.
Abstract wall reliefs by Finnish artists Sirkka and Pekka Paikkari and an oversize glazed-ceramic sculpture by Kristina Riska, both sourced from Hostler Burrows, give the streamlined table something tactile to push against.
Just down the stairs is Aamir Khandwala’s Secret Garden, a literal dreamscape of wild forms. Khandwala says he dreamed of the room while in Barcelona, surrounded by Antoni Gaudí’s organic architecture and thinking about the boundary between nature and the built environment.
Plant motifs cover the walls (some of them the building’s original brick foundation), ceiling and floor, complemented by biomorphic furnishings by design-paradigm shatterers and 1stDibs stalwarts, including Paula Hayes‘s Trapeze chandelier from Cristina Grajales Gallery, hanging overhead like an otherworldly green organism; Franck Evennou‘s swirling bronze Phoenix side chair from Maison Gerard; and from Rogan Gregory and R & Company, a sculptural gypsum-and-shearling armchair, rattan-tufted fainting sofa and Dr. Seussian furry floor lamp.
Armando Aguirre’s space pays direct tribute to Sousa, with black-and-white photographs of the composer, known as the March King, and music books displayed on custom-milled Limen Studio shelves. “I haven’t always been an interior designer,” Aguirre says. “I originally trained in music composition.”
The former fitness room — “I think it had, like, one yoga mat,” the designer says — has become a cozy salon of objects ranging across eras: an antique Persian carpet from Rug & Kilim, a Fontana Arte pendant from Donzella, a Frank Lloyd Wright dresser, a 1970s Michel Boyer lamp and a ceramic-tiled Jacques Blin cocktail table from the Somerset House.
Contemporary pieces, including a Szymanski floor lamp and stone chessboard with weighty metal chess pieces, slip into the mix so naturally that it’s almost impossible to discern what’s old and what’s new.
Noted art historian and design journalist Gay Gassmann’s selection of contemporary American art by the likes of Jack Pierson, Hank Willis Thomas, Daniel Arsham and Nancy Graves, lining the stairwell (created during one of the building’s less thoughtful renovations), gives the entire house another connective thread: not decoration as backdrop but collecting as a form of self-definition.
The works are encountered in transit, between rooms and designers, turning the stair into a true gallery.
Throughout the house, the distinction between the designed and the found, the antique and the contemporary, the useful and the purely pleasurable becomes fantastically blurred.
That may explain why the most memorable moments from this Kips Bay Show House are not necessarily the grandest ones: A lily-pad stool. A sculptural chess set. A fugitive finch. A book of matches.
