(Q) Let’s start with your name, your company, and your room. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your interests.
A: My name is Chloe Warner and I am the creative director of my company Redmond Aldrich Design based in Oakland. We do retail and residential design in California and a lot of mountain states. This is our first Florida project. We’ve had some beautiful retail projects that have been fun to work on and we also just finished a big development project in LA for a 100-unit apartment building.
(Q) What does Kips Bay mean to you? What does it mean to be a designer for this showhouse?
A: It’s such an honor. I think every designer knows about Kips Bay, and I’ve been inspired by different Kips Bay rooms for, you know, I think right when I started, I went to Kips Bay New York and I was blown away. I think some of the most exciting rooms ever come out of Kips Bay, and it’s so exciting to be able to add one of our own.
(Q) Tell us about your room and the inspiration behind the design.
A: Now this room was very simple, very white, very rectilinear. So we didn’t have anything dictating what we could or couldn’t do. I decided to look for inspiration from my grandmother, who loved Palm Beach and loved flowers, and loved playing cards. I conjured a character who is inspired by my grandmother, but also like, kind of like a 1970s Sofia Coppola-type character. I gave her a game lounge and so it is here that I would imagine she would nap on the sofa, play games with her friends, use the pool, and snooze, you know, live her best life!
(Q) What kind of vibe and aesthetic were you aiming to achieve in the project?
A: I really wanted to be able to conjure a whole world. And I think that tenting and a whole string in a single chintz fabric helped us do that. We felt like really doubling down on the monochrome green moment would be exciting and that is very much where our Primestones partnership came in. We got this beautiful stone repeated on this side, the beautiful mantle behind here and so it all came together as this, a lovely green moment.
My vision for someone using the space would be to come out one of the doors, one of the many doors in a fabulous robe, take a dip. Read a little bit, either here or there. Maybe warm up at the fire depending on what kind of day it is. And then kind of like slowly their friends, family, grandparents, grandkids start to like come in and soon there’s enough people to play a card game.And that’s really my dream, to be able to have a card game with your favorite people, a fridge full of rosé, and a special playlist.
(Q) What did the stone help you accomplish in your overall design? What drew you to the stone you selected?
So the process being out of state and not being able to go into the showroom was incredible. We got beautiful photos and kind of made our selection right away. Honed it, then honed it again. I think that for us, a honed finish, takes a little bit of the sexiness out of it and makes it a little more undone, less shiny. I really love a waxy finish. It reminds me of a dolphin. I’ve never actually touched a dolphin, but I was like, oh, I feel like honed stone looks like what I imagine a dolphin would feel like.
It was one of the most seamless stone journeys of my career, actually. It was just so many people had to come through to make this room happe and Primestones were some of our best partners and we really appreciate you. I feel like the product that came out, it wasn’t just like a nice experience to work with Primestones, but it actually like delivered and it’s so beautiful and we’re so happy.
(Q) Where there any obstacles you faced while creating this space?
The fabric came first and we didn’t have very much time to design this so at first our we really wanted to do a new stone floor. That proved overly complicatedand we realized that we could get a lot of visual impact by instead of treating the floors, treating the countertops, the backsplash, and the fireplace. So at first, it’s not as much stone, but I feel like the visual impact is greater because it’s actually facing you and not just covered in rug.
