ELLE DECOR

Do designers live differently from you and me? That’s the question behind our annual Designers at Home issue. With each site visit and in each project submission, we look for clues. And the answer, as you might expect, is yes. The designers who have invited us into their own homes for this issue, including Giorgio Armani in New York, infuse their surroundings with an aesthetic that is both powerfully felt and comfortably worn—kind of like a classic Armani jacket, or like the way Bunny Mellon, who is the inspiration behind a debut line of wallcoverings and porcelain from de Gournay, used wicker, or the way Aerin Lauder, whose new book is called Living with Flowers, understands the transformative power of even a small bouquet on a home bar, or a spray…

Irecently finished the extension and full renovation of my London apartment and home. Working for oneself is a mixed bag. It’s really exciting at first, but then it suffers the cobbler-with-no-shoes effect: The time allocated to work on it kept being deleted from the diary in favor of clients more important than myself—basically anyone. Designers’ own houses are almost always the best looking and the ones that magazines scramble to photograph, and I think that is because there are no visual compromises. Otherwise the most successful houses are, in my experience, the ones that have had the most harmonious collaboration between designer and client—and that is a delicate balance of trust, interaction, and mutual respect and understanding. But for a decorator, doing one’s own place can miss the back-and-forth that a…

There was already excitement surrounding the Vacheron Constantin Historiques 222 when it was released in solid yellow gold in 2022, but it was Brad Pitt who truly kicked it into full-blown hysteria. When he was photographed at Wimbledon the following year, casually wearing what turned out to be a vintage white gold version, the watch world began to froth at the mouth. Would Vacheron release another version of the 1977 cult classic, originally designed by Jorg Hysek, in stainless steel? After all, white gold and stainless steel do look similar at a glance, so it didn’t seem like a stretch. Sure enough, it wasn’t. The return of the 222 in steel scratches that two-year itch. Like the white gold version, it has a 37mm diameter and is 7.95mm thick, giving it…

As images of her Rue Cambon apartment attest, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel loved a great interior design detail as much as she adored little black dresses and layered ropes of pearls. The fashion designer’s passion for decorating was an inspiration for architect Peter Marino when he unveiled Chanel’s Fifth Avenue jewelry flagship last year; the space features hand-painted coromandelstyle lacquer walls, a nod to the screens in Coco’s Paris home. Another Chanel hallmark, the quilt motif, adorns not the walls of a boutique but Coco Crush, a line of versatile fine jewelry pieces marked with incisions that mimic the cushioning of Chanel’s classic handbags. Inspired by the horse blankets and stable jackets she saw during her love affair with equestrian Etienne Balsan, the matelassé technique finds its most precious expression in new…

No matter how big or small a house, there always seems to be a room that becomes the center of it all. Maybe the light is brighter there, the air circulation fresher, the vibes inexplicably better. Maybe it’s all three. For Elle Decor A-List interior designer Sheila Bridges, that room is the large enclosed porch at the back of her Hudson Valley home, featured on the cover of our September 2020 issue. Or perhaps we should say the front of the home, as Bridges prefers that guests walk through her yard and garden before entering the house. This enclosed porch wears more hats than one might expect. Aside from being Bridges’s alternate foyer, it’s also a dining room, a workspace (when she needs a break from her in-house studio), and a place…