A Trip to the Kips Bay Decorator Show House, and the Timeless Voyeurism of the 1 Percent

I’ve never met a home I didn’t want to go into, and I suspect I’m not alone. I can’t be, otherwise real estate reality television, people who drop into open houses for properties they can’t afford, and the Kips Bay Decorator Show House, now in its 47th year, wouldn’t exist. 

For those unfamiliar, each year, and now in three cities (New York, Dallas, and Palm Springs) the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club, which offers educational and developmental programs for children who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, opens up a home, newly redecorated by today’s best and brightest designers, for the public to walk through. Proceeds from the tickets go to the organization, melding the charity model’s long history of benefits and events hosted by the wealthy with a hint of the crowdfunding and mutual aid of today, the have-nots rubbing the metaphorical shoulders of the haves via their wallpapers, chaise lounges and rugs.

The homes themselves are the kind that one is only able to walk by and marvel at, homes that, if you have a chance to go inside, it’s because it’s been turned into a museum, the robber barons who built it long gone, their  descendants now living in glassy penthouses overlooking sweeping vistas. The location of this year’s New York City edition, the first in three years, was no exception. 337 Riverside Drive, called the River Mansion, has a long and storied history, with a notable appearance by Shakespearean actress Julia Marlowe. Since the 1970s, the home has been owned by a member of the Bronfman family, first by Edgar Jr., and then by his ex-wife Sherry, who kept it in their divorce and raised their children there. Edgar bought the house for $5.6 million in 1978, and Sherry has now put it on the market for a cool $24 million.

To some attending the event, the appeal of the house was the rooms, all of which were renovated in 40 days, each by a different designer, which brings to the whole thing a unique hodgepodge affect, every space a different intense interpolation of families who had lived there, the building’s future, and its past. As anyone can realize, a little over a month to renovate a 10,000 square foot, over 100-year-old mansion on the Upper West Side is no time at all. But upon arriving at the River Mansion, I noticed that it was less what had been done to the place that appealed and more the possibility of all its lives colliding.

The doors opened at 10 a.m., the crowd a range of clear design obsessives, those in the industry, and those somewhere on that spectrum. We were directed to go to the top floor first and work our way down—by the interior elevator if we liked, though my companion and I chose to hoof it on the stairs, getting glances of what was to come on the way up. Though, according to the floor plan, the house has five bedrooms and five bathrooms; a wine cellar and a wine room; a living room, family room, media room and den; a library; two kitchens (one eat-in); a dining room; and includes both a courtyard and roof deck (the latter not available to the viewing public). Many of the rooms had been styled as living rooms—at least a designer’s interpretation of one—but not as a family would actually live there.

Why we were sent to the top became clear immediately: the room, a bedroom, was designed by Sasha Bikoff (seen up top) and looked exactly like the bedroom I designed for my Animal Crossing avatar during the depths of the pandemic. (This is a compliment, to be clear!)

But it was the "befores" I was craving, and the internet delivered. The house was opened to the public because of Sherry’s daughter Hannah, a self-described "Creator / Angel Investor / Activist." According to her husband Brendan Fallis, a self-described "Creator / Connector / DJ," he arranged for it to be shown. (The couple are passionate about design and real estate: they are currently renovating their New York apartment, and regularly update their Hamptons property as well.) For the rare person looking to offload a property out of reach for most, one that hadn’t been updated in years, a Kips Bay Decorator Show House seems like the perfect marriage, a way to bring in interest, raise your price point as you do so with the many ample sponsors the opportunity provides, and for a good cause.

But it’s the images of the house before the renovation Fallis has posted—if you’re interested in a full video tour of the reimagine house, he has that too—that add the most intrigue, the contrast of what was and what is that invoke the many lives an overwhelming space like the River Mansion can be. It is in the befores you can see what Sherry, a former actress and model clearly passionate about color, who once told New York magazine she painted the roof purple with a blue rectangle on it so the house would look like it had a pool on it from above, had done to such a likely formal and staid space. She’d injected it with verve to contrast its history, and some of that has been lost, however temporarily, in the space now—particularly the parquet floors. Gone are the neon walls and glass bricks; in are marbles and grays. 

And while the new primary bathroom has all the chic calm of a hotel, I found myself wincing over the loss of the Mondrian-esque colorblocking tile.

At the same time, that is perhaps the most interesting thing about seeing a house in between one life and another—as my viewing companion pointed out, it felt like being in "an actual dollhouse." This particular moment seemed to be inspired by a wide range of historical locations, giving some of the rooms a slight whiff of colonizer energy that might not had existed had they all been cohesive. When given the moon, any artist will of course shoot for the stars.

In that way, the River Mansion in this moment encapsulated a strange quality, the briefest moment in time, a mix of old and new worlds, aesthetically and culturally. It is rare to get to look inside the walls of neighbors we’re most curious about, and rarer still to feel like you are time traveling. If only we knew we’d be invited back.

The 2023 Kips Bay Decorator Show House will be open through Tuesday June 6; tickets are $40.

Top Photo by Nickolas Sargent.

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