April 7, 2024Sheila Bridges drinks deep from the Pierian Springs of her favorite haunts. Urban life in Harlem, where she lives and works, inspired her celebrated Harlem Toile de Jouy design, and that New York neighborhood’s jazzy energy animates her elegant interiors. Her creative soul also draws sustenance from the bucolic Hudson Valley.
Some 30 years ago, she began trekking upstate to the town of Hudson to visit its many antique shops and became smitten by the place. What appealed to her, she says, were “the viewsheds, the colors and the light, which I think are part of the reason why there is a Hudson River School of painting, why people like Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church and a lot of other important artists came here.”
Bridges first bought a farm right on the river, replete with horses, goats, sheep and chickens. Then, five years ago, in an effort to simplify her life, she sold the farm and built herself a small barn-like home, with the waggish name Hay House, in a hamlet not far from Hudson. She quickly decorated the ground-floor public rooms but only recently put the finishing touches on her personal boudoir and bath upstairs.
The decor is a tribute to the area and those 19th-century painters who exalted the beauty of its panoramic vistas, especially their delicate, luminous tones. “You see the room’s colors — the soft blues, purples and greens — in the local landscapes and sunsets,” says Bridges.
Paintings from the Hudson River School hang salon-style on one of the bedroom walls, surrounding an antique Swedish desk with an exquisite robin’s-egg blue interior (Bridges acquired it, like most of the room’s furnishings, from a local dealer). She covered the seat of her Gustavian desk chair with part of the canvas of a minor painting from that school. The antique pillar by the window came from the estate sale of the late fashion editor André Leon Talley at nearby STAIR Galleries. Inside the cloche on top are two antique curios from the Mercanteinfiera, the legendary antiques fair in Parma, Italy, which Bridges frequently attends.
A great believer in papering bedrooms, Bridges has covered hers in Strawberry Hill Quatrefoil from Adelphi Paper Hangings. Its combination of gentle green and sand is part of her new collection of signature colorways for that upstate artisanal producer. Bridges says she loves the intricate little block print — a historic pattern from Sir Horace Walpole’s famous Gothic Revival villa in London — because “it doesn’t jump out at you. It’s so subtle, it almost reads as a solid wall.” Providing added, if muted, interest to the room without distracting from the art, the paper serves as a rich and delectable layer in her radiant decorative scheme, as does the gray-pink hue she painted the ceiling, courtesy Farrow & Ball’s Peignoir.
Bridges has dressed her bed with silk pillows decorated with her Harlem Toile, part of a new collection for Gingerlily, the London luxury bedding company. She conceived her satiric design, which features Black characters dressed in 18th-century costume in pastoral settings pursuing stereotypical activities like playing hoops and weaving hair, back in 2006, when she couldn’t find a contemporary wallpaper she liked for her apartment.
Displayed front and center above the bed amidst photos of family and pets is another locally acquired treasure, a rare 19th-century circular sand painting depicting a local riverscape. It’s flanked by two more curios discovered at the Mercanteinfiera.
Less travel was involved in finding the bedroom’s table lamps and the pair of vintage Swedish chests — those Bridges scouted on 1stDibs. If you are beginning to wonder if she has a special fondness for Swedish design, she does. In fact, she has a penchant for all things Nordic. She named her dog Loki for the Norse god of mischief and keeps an apartment in Reykjavik, Iceland, where she unwinds after European shopping trips.
Meanwhile, her paean to pastoral vistas continues in her design for her bathroom. Shortly before she built Hay House, she participated in the Kips Bay Decorator Show House and had R.Graves & Co. paint a mural of Central Park for her room. As it was only a temporary installation, the work was rendered on a removable mud-cloth canvas, and after the show, Bridges rolled it up and stored it in her attic. Calvert Vaux, one of the 19th-century masterminds behind the design of Central Park, also consulted on Olana, Church’s fabled Hudson River estate, which is not far from where Bridges lives. So, she felt the mural was very much in keeping with her decorative theme. One section covers the wall in back of her sink, and from the remaining piece, she cut out a couple of Arcadian views and displayed them in frames on the other bathroom walls.
“That,” she quips, “is my kind of upcycling!”
