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Quiet, Please

Ensconced on the Upper East Side, Kips Bay's show house turned 30 with a subdued display of excellence

Jane Margolies -- Interior Design, 9/1/2002 12:00:00 AM

The Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club Decorator Show House, the annual bellwether—and arbiter—of taste, has seen plenty of attention-grabbing, rock-'em-shock-'em rooms. Not in 2002. Perhaps in response to the tragic memory of last September and an economic downturn, the 16 professionals chosen to participate in the 30th Kips Bay show house presented sober, sensible schemes. "There wasn't so much over-the-top glitter, glitz, and gilding," says Harry Hinson, the event's honorary chairman.

Not that installations at the seven-story Upper East Side town house suffered for this display of reason and restraint. In an impressive Kips Bay debut, Michael Rosenberg & Associates managed to turn a 9-by-20-foot former office into a luxurious, almost spacious retreat, thanks to clever built-ins and an ingenious approach to seating. Blair Design Associates, another newcomer working with a small, narrow space, used rich color and texture to achieve a jewel box of a study where everything gleamed. Kips Bay veteran Celeste Cooper, the design director of the Repertoire stores in SoHo and Boston, exercised her modern muscle by stripping away extraneous ornamentation (chair rails, mantelpiece) to reinvent a large bedroom as a toffee-colored sitting room with a calming effect on visitors. "That's the thing I'm most proud of: that people felt good in the space," says Cooper. "To me, that's the highest accolade."