(Q) Let’s start with your name, your company, and your room. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your interests.
A: Hi, I’m Cindy Rinfret, and I’m Taylor Stebbins and we’re Rinfret Interior Designs. This is the “Seashell Sanctuary” at Kips Bay 2024! Rinfret Limited is based in Greenwich, Connecticut. We have a satellite office in Palm Beach and we work all over the country. We’ve written some books, and our specialty is timeless interiors, a very classic design that lasts the test of time.
(Q) What does Kips Bay mean to you? What does it mean to be a designer for this showhouse?
A: Taylor: We participated in the Kips Bay 2019 show House in Palm Beach, and I wasn’t with the company at the time, but now I’m here working with my mother, which is so fantastic. From a personal level, it’s amazing to work on 2024 Kips Bay. The organization itself does so much good for children all over the country. When I was in high school, I did art programs after school, and so I understand the importance of it. It’s really such a blessing to be able to participate in it and be included with all these different designers around the country.
A: Cindy: The Kips Bay Showhouse for a designers is like the Oscars of Design. This is where all the best designers get started and get seen all over the country and it truly is an honor to be associated with Kips Bay and the Boys and Girls Club.
(Q) Tell us about your room and the inspiration behind the design.
A: Cindy: The room was inspired by Vizcaya. We wanted to take the 18th-century shell grotto work and make it a new and fresh idea. I had done another celebrity client’s powder room all in shell and what I learned from that I used here in Kips Bay.
A: Taylor: We really wanted to bring in all the different textures and elements. Our room is quite serene when you turn the corner. We liken it to, as Cindy said, our kind of secret grotto, heavily inspired by Vizcaya in Miami. We really wanted to take a lot of those glam elements and make it feel fresh while using different marble specimens, different wall coverings, and different textures to create this bespoke space.
(Q) What kind of vibe and aesthetic were you aiming to achieve in the project?
A: Cindy: The most important thing in Rinfret rooms a lot of times is discovery. When you’re in this room, you start discovering all these incredible textures. You don’t walk into the room and see the whole thing at once. It’s something that when you’re in here, you sit and then you discover the embroidery on the fabric, the shells on the ceiling, the beautiful rock crystals, the amazing stone on our side tables. I think when we were inspired by this, it was an inspiration of discovery.
A: Taylor: The room reveals itself to you as you kind of enter. It was really important for us to create different vignettes throughout. We have a little writing desk with different invitations that we’ve received over the past year that we’ve been collecting, but then also we have sort of a little caviar setup on the coffee table and it’s meant to feel collected, like the person who lives here has been here forever and well traveled.
(Q) What did the stone help you accomplish in your overall design? What drew you to the stone you selected?
A: Taylor: We’re so happy that we found Primestones because we went to Vizcaya and thought to ourselves, we have to use something unexpected, something unique. Primestones came to mind. This console behind us had a sort of black granite top that it had come with, which was lovely, but for this space, it wasn’t quite right. Cindy and I went to the gorgeous showroom, and they had all of the slabs laid out for us to look at. I think the slab that we ended up picking was one of the first that we saw, it just really spoke to us. It had this amazing texture in it and veining that really spoke to us and then the color was quite spot on with everything we were doing, that kind of aqua blue.
A: Cindy: Stone and marble are nature’s antiques. It’s not just material, but I get so inspired by the history, the veining, where it’s from, where it’s traveled from to get here. A lot of people forget these things are in Brazil, they’re in Greece and then they have to be mined, they have to be brought here. It’s quite an art form. And to walk into Primestones and see all these amazing slabs. That’s our favorite part of the job, is going to the stone yard and picking out something spectacular.
