Three Design Teams Face the 'Hall of Fame' of Showhouses | Waccabuc Real Estate

[The completed Carrier and Company room. Photos of finished rooms by Will Femia.]
In 1987, the New York Times described being chosen for the Kips Bay Decorator Show House as the equivalent of "Harvard Medical School, the Pulitzer Prize, the Baseball Hall of Fame and the New York State Lottery rolled into one." Former Architectural Digest editor-in-chief Paige Rense compared the experience—an exhibition of interior designers' work that draws an estimated 15,000 people each year—to "doing your first show on Broadway."

Thanks to digital coverage, the showhouse is the most visible one in the country, says designer, author, and past Kips Bay participant Charlotte Moss. For a young designer, it is, genuinely, an honor—and a guarantee of some career cred—just to be invited. But those who find themselves designing rooms next to the best in the profession—Kips Bay, in its 41 years, has shown off the work of people like Jeffrey Bilhuber, Mario Buatta, Jamie Drake, Thom Filicia, Albert Hadley, Victoria Hagan, Alexa Hampton, and Celerie Kemble—also have much to prove.

And the process isn't an easy one. Unlike an ordinary design project, where decor comes together over a period of months—if not years—the showhouse must be completed within weeks. Designers with wildly different styles end up with rooms next to each other and without clients setting the direction of their work. Young designers—who are chosen after a committee reviews photographs of their work—must "know what they're doing" when it comes to design.

"We want to see that they understand scale," says Bunny Williams, a decorator and chair of the showhouse. And then they must be able to face the practicalities of showhouse work: being assigned the tiniest, least glamorous rooms that may cost them tens of thousands of dollars to put together.




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