Continuing our celebration of fifteen years of rooms we love, we are revisiting “Sleeping Beauty,” the bedroom we created for the 2018 Kips Bay Decorator Show House in New York.

The inspiration for this room begins with our muse, Pauline de Rothschild, an American fashion designer, writer, and legendary tastemaker who spent much of her adult life in Paris. Her Paris home reflected the same sense of individuality she brought to everything she touched: refined but unexpected, with beautiful French antiques, touches of chinoiserie, and an elegance that felt collected rather than composed.

For “Sleeping Beauty,” we enveloped the bedroom in a custom hand-painted celadon garden wallpaper by Gracie Studio, creating an immersive backdrop that wrapped the entire space. The garden continued through delicate porcelain flowers by the extraordinary artist Vladimir Kanevsky, which we displayed on brackets along the bedroom walls. Together, the wallpaper and porcelain flowers gave the room a romantic, almost dreamlike quality.

As beautiful as the decorative elements were, it was important that the room also felt personal and lived-in. We brought in a thirty-year archive of World of Interiors magazines, stacks of favorite design and fashion books, and even a vintage corded phone — a detail included in each of my showhouse rooms. These familiar objects gave the room a sense of history and personality, as though someone truly lived there. I believe the things you collect and love are often what bring a room to life. 

The concept for the room was also inspired by the idea of a bedsit, a bedroom conceived not simply as a place to sleep, but as a room to truly live in: somewhere to read a book, write a note, have a drink, or even eat a meal. It is an idea embraced by some of the chicest tastemakers—Annette de la Renta, Stephen Sills, Nicky Haslam, Sir John Richardson, and, of course, Pauline de Rothschild.

Our Kips Bay room was a wonderful example of how an interior can be entirely beautiful while remaining deeply comfortable: a velvet chair tucked into the corner, piles of books and magazines within reach, and a sense that everything was meant to be used and enjoyed. A great room should do more than look beautiful, it should inspire and energize the person who spends time there. Years later, “Sleeping Beauty” remains a reminder that the most memorable rooms balance beauty and imagination with comfort and a deeply personal point of view.