Interior Design Lessons From Two New York Legends

New York, the city where dreams are made and design aesthetics are as varied as the people living there. There are the grand pre-war apartments of Fifth Avenue, with their stately entrance halls and soaring ceilings; the sprawling artists’ lofts of 1970s SoHo; the prim and proper residences of Park Avenue and, of course, that alluring downtown boho fluency. It’s a city in which opposite ideas have always been allowed to flourish.

You would be hard-pressed to find two better New York designers to illustrate that multiplicity than Bunny Williams and Jonathan Adler.

Williams, who grew up in Virginia before studying and settling in New York, belongs to one of the great lineages of American decorating. After working at Manhattan antiques gallery Stair & Co., she spent 22 years at the legendary Parish-Hadley Associates, working on homes for some of America’s most prominent families before establishing her own firm in 1988. Her beautifully decadent but decidedly comfortable interiors have since made her an authority on a particular kind of New York elegance. And her latest book, Decoration, distills much of that knowledge into a 406-page masterclass on proportion, craftsmanship and the delicate business of combining old things with new ones.

Adler is very specific about this. In 1986, as a college student from a small town, he visited The Odeon in Tribeca. “I was staying with a wealthy college pal on the Upper East Side,” he remembers. “We got into their chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, barreled downtown and I went through a portal to the world I hoped to inhabit.”

The atmosphere – a combination of downtown creatives, warm, moody lighting and a certain louche unpredictability – grabbed him immediately. “The restaurant is well designed but not over-designed,” he says. “The majesty of it is not rational. It’s a vibe.”

It’s a useful lesson. To avoid a technically put-together room feeling inert, Adler argues that the best interiors “need to feel a certain way. The route to the vibe isn’t rational and most definitely isn’t perfect.”

Williams came to a similar conclusion from a very different New York reference. Two particular apartments lodged themselves in her imagination: William Paley’s grand Fifth Avenue home, filled with exceptional furniture and art but still “incredibly comfortable and inviting,” and fashion designer Bill Blass’s much more sparse Sutton Place apartment, where a handful of remarkable pieces created a “serene, chic space.”

“They were both stimulating to me in completely different ways,” she says.

For both designers, the key is to stop trying to replicate a look wholesale and instead decide what you want a room to feel like, allowing a choice of objects to help get you there.

For Adler, the lesson of New York’s most notable apartments is nothing to do with deference to their stateliness and traditions. “The lesson is to be immoderate,” he says.

“When I was young and broke, my apartment looked amazing and I spent nada on it,” he says. “I found a sofa on the street. I painted the walls and found great light fixtures at the flea market. And, being a potter, I made a ton of groovy pots.”

The SoHo of the 1970s permeates Adler’s work. His Atelier Adler on West Broadway sits opposite Walter De Maria’s 1977 installation The Broken Kilometer, a work he describes as his “temple”; even the rows of fluorescent studio lights inside his store pay homage to it.

The transferable idea is to give yourself permission to decorate with lively conviction. A boldly colored lamp, your own artwork or something dramatically oversized might have considerably more presence than a room full of respectable purchases. Character is not born of beige expectedness.

“Chandeliers and rugs,” Adler fires back quickly when asked where to go big on spend. Then he reconsiders. “Oh, also paint or wall treatments. And sofas and chairs. And accessories. And…”

He jokes, though there’s a great point to take in. Far from subscribing to a rigid hierarchy of investment pieces, his point is about leaning fully into the environment you’re wanting to create. Lighting so deeply affects atmosphere; rugs establish scale and anchor furniture; wall treatments can change the whole feeling of an unremarkable shell.

Williams’ advice is equally useful, albeit from another direction: invest attention in the craftsmanship that will make a space function beautifully. New York, in particular, “has an abundance of creative talent” from furniture designers to custom lighting artists, she posits. But regardless of where you are in the world, she urges you to “work with designers with a dedication to quality.” In other words, spend on pieces that are exquisitely made, properly executed and that will help to make the space fun, comfortable, easy and enjoyable to be in.

Their perspectives might be poles apart stylistically but, in the course of building these lessons, it’s clear they both agree on some core principles. Chief among them? Commit, wholeheartedly, to your own point of view.