The menu was delectable: a frisée salad with a dollop of toasted goat cheese, a behemoth beef tenderloin, a rounded devil’s food cake with dulce de leche in the center, and a silky Cabernet to wash it all down. But what made the elegant President’s Dinner for the Kips Bay Decorator Show House, held in the ballroom of the Mandarin Oriental hotel, so much fun was the abundance of lightning-witted designers—mostly sans clients.
The menu was delectable: a frisée salad with a dollop of toasted goat cheese, a behemoth beef tenderloin, a rounded devil’s food cake with dulce de leche in the center, and a silky Cabernet to wash it all down. But what made the elegant President’s Dinner for the Kips Bay Decorator Show House , held in the ballroom of the Mandarin Oriental hotel, so much fun was the abundance of lightning-witted designers—mostly sans clients.
This is the 40th year of the Show House, which raises money for the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club; it’s being staged in the Aldyn Residences, located at 60 Riverside Boulevard, May 16 through June 14. To mark the anniversary, the dinner (sponsored by Architectural Digest ) honored several designers who participated in the original 1973 edition. Next up was the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club Choir, who performed an inspired version of Gladys Knight’s “The Dream” (no dry eyes in the house).
Also honored was 90-year-old artist Jeremiah Goodman, whose dreamy sketches—captured in the book Jeremiah: A Romantic Vision (powerHouse)—depict some of the great 20th-century interiors: Babe Paley’s bedroom, Diana Vreeland’s all-red sitting room, Greta Garbo’s living room. “My paintings speak so much about how I feel about all of you,” he told the audience during a dry-humored speech. “The beauty you try to give to so many people—some deserving and certainly a lot, as you would all agree, undeserving.”
In a similar spirit of levity, we asked designers in attendance if they’d endured any amusing dramas at showhouses over the years. And for those who typically visit showhouses as guests, we asked them about moments of inspiration they’d experienced.
Gala cochair Jamie Drake, with a pink pocket square accenting his dinner jacket, described the drill. “I always call it the miracle of the showhouses, because you may think the rooms will never get completed,” said the interior designer, whose clients include Michael Bloomberg. “I do remember one drama—not mine. On opening night at one showhouse, a designer still had painters working. And the woman in charge of the showhouse kept saying, ‘Leave, leave!’ Guests were walking through with cocktails, and there were still painters on ladders dripping paint. It was practically a knock-down, drag-out fight between the designer in her cocktail dress and the organizers.”
Show House chair Bunny Williams, wearing a bright-blue coat from Lee Anderson, conceded, “This is a group of people that does come with just a little bit of drama. One year, when I was at Parish-Hadley, Albert Hadley decided to do a showhouse all on his own. He was trying to create a modern, sort of spare look. And when he finished, Mrs. Parish walked in and said, ‘I hate it!’ And she proceeded to go out in the station wagon to find every accessory she could possibly put into the room.”
Mario Buatta, a famous practical joker, recalled a run-in he had during the very first Kips Bay Show House, where the designers next to him were a former female employee and a onetime male client. “My client had suddenly become a decorator with one of my former assistants,” he said. “They kept arguing and being bitchy. The guy, my former client, came in, and he was eating potato chips. And I said, ‘Look, I don’t own this carpet.’ With that, he dropped the bag. When I told him to pick it up, he said, ‘Well, I can see you’re not a gentleman.’ To which I replied, ‘Yes, and I can see you’re not a lady.’”
The first time gala cochair Richard Mishaan did Kips Bay, he and Buatta had never met. “Buatta said, ‘Who is that kid?’” Mishaan recalled. “Because Mario’s got a great sense of humor, he wanted to tease me. So when I was walking by, he was on the phone with Stark Carpet, and he said, ‘I’m looking for a rug. I can’t think what I want.’ And then he said, ‘Ah, I’ve found inspiration in Richard Mishaan’s hair. I want Mongolian lamb.’ They were all laughing, and I said nothing but thought, ‘I’ll get even.’” The next day, when Buatta apologized, Mishaan replied that he’d found inspiration from the veteran (and balding) designer. “He said, ‘Really, in what way?’” recounts Mishaan. “I told him, ‘I’m leaving the floors bare.’”
“Once I was working with Robert Metzger [the late New York designer] and a screen fell over on guests as they were going through the space,” offered Thom Filicia. “That was my introduction to Kips Bay—picking a screen up off two women.”
On his way into dinner, tennis great John McEnroe indicated that his rocker wife, Patty Smyth, “makes the decisions” when it comes to their interiors. Rock-inspired? “Not so rock ’n’ roll anymore,” answered Smyth. “We’ve just raised four of our six kids, and we’re trying to make it clean and simple. I like midcentury.”
“Modern and old-school mixed,” said McEnroe, adding, “I love showhouses.”
No cocktail in hand, Lauren duPont, wearing a vintage 1960s Valentino dress, said that though she lives in a minimalist space in New York, she’s a person who loves print and pattern. At showhouses, she enjoys seeing “a little glimpse of what designers believe is happening at the moment.” She recalled a garden room one year at Kips Bay that featured Dek Tillett pillows and fabrics. “It actually inspired me to call up the Tilletts in Massachusetts,” she said.
At her first Kips Bay Show House, in 1990, Victoria Hagan (also a cochair of the evening) said, “We were all convinced the place was haunted. You’d spend a lot of late hours there, and you would hear things and wonder where they were coming from.” She added that “Kips Bay really started my career—it was an important place. So the ghosts have been good to me.”
Steven Stolman, the president of Scalamandré, recounted the time he set up a little private bar in the bathroom of a Scalamandré-sponsored room. “I had seen it done at an antiques show, and that particular booth was the most popular at the show,” he said. “So I thought, ‘Let’s serve Champagne out of the bathtub.’ And it quickly became the most popular room in the showhouse. But we very quickly got shut down. Let’s just say I got a very gentle, very polite slap on the wrist.”
“You can’t have a showhouse and not have something horrendous, amusing, and enchanting happen all at the same time,” noted the vivaciously warm Charlotte Moss, in a colorful floor-length dress. Any dramatic moments Moss didn’t find very amusing? “I’ve never had any real traumas,” she said. “I’ve had some traumatic spaces—like a passageway I turned into a bedroom. It had a fire escape and an old elevator shaft all in the same room. That was fun. But decorating is about the challenges and the possibilities.”
