Showstopping Style: Rooms with a View

Twenty-five years after Albert Hadley dreamed up Rooms with a View, the annual event continues its display of beauty and beneficence.

In Good Cheer

Is breakfast time too early for a party? Not when the champagne is perfectly chilled, and the setting is as festive as the one created by Greenwich designer Amy Zolin. Silvery walls hand painted by Ridgefield decorative artist Christopher Rollinson nod to the event’s twenty-fifth anniversary. To that elegant backdrop, Zolin added playful color. “Blue and yellow together make a really happy space,” she says. Indeed, the ceiling’s Schumacher fabric makes the whole vignette feel washed in sunshine. Gold and silver light fixtures, a lacquered Dunes and Duchess table, and accents of luscious blue leather provide still more shine. Cynthia Byrnes Contemporary Art rounded out the look with a collection of modern works by New York artist Eugene Brodsky.
Interior design: Amy Zolin, Clarity Home Interiors
Photography: Allan Barry

Dazzling Design

In Christina Roughan’s elegant salon, the details matter. The wall moldings, reminiscent of Parisian architecture, are lovely all by themselves, but just look at how Roughan has played them up with polished nickel trim along the top and a striking panel of black marble that cascades between the two panels at the back of the room. The sleek sofa, a Roughan design influenced by 1940s Paris, is made all the more enticing by a pair of fringed pillows. Throughout the space, Roughan combined traditional and modern elements. Witness the 1950s-era Italian chandelier that hangs from the classic ceiling medallion. Even the art gets in on the time-travel act; ink drawings by Jean Cocteau hang across from Gangsta, an arresting photograph of a Namibian girl by British photographer David Yarrow.
Interior design: Christina Roughan, Roughan Interiors

All in the Family

Eliza Crater’s involvement in this twenty-fifth year of Rooms with a View is more than fitting, given her design lineage. Crater is the great granddaughter of Sister Parish, the iconic designer and longtime collaborator of the event’s founder, Albert Hadley. The space Crater designed is a clear homage to both Hadley and Parish. “When I’m designing a space, I think about how Albert and Sister combined their tastes,” she says. The sumptuous fabric that stands in for walls is based on an original Tree of Life design by Hadley. The chinoiserie panel was Parish’s own, Crater says. And she opted to illuminate the scene with a Moravian star light—an element Hadley frequently employed in his own designs.
Interior design: Eliza Crater, Sister Parish Design