A pair of double-faced silk portieres fabricated by the ladies at RoseHyll Studio separate Michael Herold’s patrician entry from Dan Fink’s deco-inflected ground floor landing at this year’s Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse. And yet the spaces flow together to set the tone for another banner year at this time-honored charity event on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
“In design, traditional elements are loaded with the meanings they have accumulated over time. The iconography that accompanies neoclassicism, for example, has always spoken to power and those who would seize it. Greek, Roman, Napoleonic, Federal, Fascist: their not coincidentally shared imagery is meant to convey strength and mastery. The dynastic decor of the caesars, the sinister visual domination of a mammoth monolith in the era of Mussolini, the suggestion of solidity and security in the decorations of a Federal Bank in the American Midwest—traditional cues can function as tropes that help invest a space with a thought, a sensibility, or a hope, their meaning immediately identifiable to a passing glance.”