Hot on the heels of its New York counterpart’s golden jubilee, the Kips Bay Decorator Show House Dallas has opened its doors in the tony Turtle Creek neighborhood. In addition to supporting the Boys & Girls Club, which serves more than 12,000 young people in the Bronx, the Texan show house—this year vice-chaired by Shelby Wagner and Trish Sheats, with Jan Showers and Jamie Drake as honorary chairs—also benefits Dwell With Dignity, a nonprofit that creates abodes for families facing poverty, and the Crystal Charity Ball, which supports children’s charities throughout the Dallas County.
Something borrowed, something new
Austin-based designer Avery Cox crafted a listening room dubbed “Blue in Green.” As the designer explains, the name was much more than a reference to the room’s colors (the walls are Benjamin Moore’s Robin’s Nest). Her approach was an homage to the Miles Davis track and “the idea of a jazz riff,” in this case, playing on classic styling cues from Billy Baldwin and Albert Hadley. Case in point: Cox upholstered Baldwin’s iconic Slipper Chair in a Lapis Lazuli–inspired fabric from Sister by Studio Ashby.
Ellerslie Interiors embraced the French Renaissance-style building’s good bones for her Mahjong Room. “The architecture carries such a strong vernacular that we approached it almost like a dialogue between East and West—layering lacquer, brass, and mirror against the home’s more traditional bones,” principal Laura Lubin tells AD PRO. “Installing the Robert Kuo hand-hammered dragon bench under the silk moiré walls was a goosebump moment.”
Lisa & Leroy played with the poetry of architectural form in the expansive outdoor terrace, embracing the existing building and creating folly structures to reimagine the space as an indoor-outdoor experience. “Every piece of furniture was custom upholstered”—with fabrics from Sutherland, Perennials, Pooky, and other textile titans—“to show how truly comfortable outdoor living can be,” says owner and creative director Lisa Schaffer. Other rooms also bring the outdoors in, like Paloma Contreras’s inviting morning room clad in Hortus Medicus wallpaper from the Bunny Mellon collection by de Gournay.
But not every designer got to reap the benefit of a design-ready room. Mohon Interiors was assigned a former office space, which they managed to transform into an elegant Evening Lounge, overhauling HVAC, ceiling, floors, and electrical work. The end result’s highlight is a dramatic curtain of ShimmerScreen metal beads surrounding an oak-and-steel table by Berman Rosetti.
Bespoke craft meets digital consulting
Bureau Interior Architecture and Design was allocated the room next door to Cox’s Listening Lounge. The firm created a yin to her yang: a “Quiet Room” with the walls clad in a raw silk Dedar fabric and Holland & Sherry trimmings. A custom ceiling fixture reminiscent of French skylights crafted by artisan Ben Tuna of Glass Visions Studio hangs above, reminiscent of French skylights.
In fact, several designers turned to small bespoke artisans for their rooms, including Doniphan Moore, who conjured a River Room salon fit for worldly Texas collectors. Inside, work from Dallas-based Casci Plaster provides a sculpted architectural frame to ground a custom hand-painted de Gournay wallpaper from the brand’s new collection.
Nicole Zarr also used de Gournay as a jumping-off point. “Last January at Deco Off, I fell head over heels for the striking new Pietra Dura floral-blocked design,” says Zarr, who worked with the textile house to custom color the design. The result is a wall covering of sumptuous chocolate brown, which “provides the ideal foil for my signature canary yellow.”
Yates Desygn, whose principals Mike Yates and Bryan Yates served as Kips Bay Dallas alumni chairs alongside Javier Burkle, took on the Parlour, outfitting it with creative use of brass (most notably, the mesh ceiling fixture) and a dramatically angled rug designed to highlight the parquet flooring. But when asked for the element they were proudest of, the Yates partners pointed to the leather wrapping of the room’s cabinet, wall, and column, performed by their wallpaper installer. “We may never get him to do it again, but it looks amazing,” cofounder Mike Yates said.
Mythical beings and old-world motifs
Two AD PRO Directory designers embraced the concept of curiosity with different yet resoundingly successful results. Before designing her room, Sarah Stacey says she wondered whether “curiosity” could be a design style. Her resulting study embraces color, classic old-world motifs, and elements of the surreal, perhaps most obviously evidenced by the fire surround with its Hell’s Mouth motif, a bespoke piece conceived in Stacey’s studio and realized through 3D printing by Innova 3D. The design is counterbalanced by the sweet decorative painting on the ceiling by Anne Meredith Design. Meanwhile, Studio Eckström treated curiosity “as a kind of currency” in Mr. Trotter’s Drawing Room, inspired by the Gilded Age. Here, French silhouettes meet classical American luxury in a Vaughan Designs chandelier, statement drapery by The Shade Store and carpets by Patterson Flynn, Kyle Bunting, and Arsin Rug Gallery.
Dramatic stone has long been the hallmark of a beautiful kitchen, and indeed, Christopher Architecture and Interiors embraced it in the kitchen and vestibule with Calacatta Sunset marble countertops and a backsplash from Francois & Co. But the stone statues of Apollo and Artemis are what really set the dialogue for the kitchen, which also sports fixtures sourced from Kohler; they were sourced during a trip to the South of France in early 2025. The mythological figures guided the room’s aesthetic, embodying “a principle of balance and harmony between light and shadow." says the firm’s principal, Chris Reebals.
For designer Jean Liu, who serves as the show house cochair alongside Chad Dorsey, fiction met reality in a fascinating site-specific installation. Her design firm collaborated with German artist Florian Meisenburg on a classical rotunda space. “I decided to take an unexpected approach and let the art come first,” Liu tells AD PRO. “I wondered what would happen if the entire rotunda became an installation.”
The final result features Meisenburg’s paintings hung against a matrix-style wall covering, in an installation that feels part optical illusion, part “reference to a video game,” says Liu. Against the classical style of the show house’s architecture, it’s an experimental design approach that suspends convention itself.
The Kips Bay Decorator Show House Dallas runs until November 23. Tickets can be purchased here.
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