Bring the Drama

Casey Kenyon reimagines a theater director's New York lair as a stage for living.

- Camille Okhio

We all love a bit of theater in our lives, but it's got to be the right kind. For New York-based interior designer Casey Kenyon, the best spaces mix drama with comfort. So it was fitting that one of his first clients, Stephen Sposito, was a theater director who commissioned Kenyon to design his studio in Hell's Kitchen.

In the four years since the designer founded his firm, Studio Kenyon, he has swiftly gained a reputation for creating layered interiors with equal parts showmanship and sensitivity. He developed his eye first by working as an assistant to Marc Jacobs, helping the fashion designer while he was decorating his Greenwich Village home. "Casey is supportive, agile, and empathetic," Jacobs says. "He absorbed my appreciation for things, researched them, and went further. He's like a sponge."

Eventually, Kenyon set out on a design path, working initially for ELLE DECOR A-List firm Gachot Studios and then as design director at the trendsetting New York lighting and furniture studio Apparatus. Sposito, who has been an assistant director on such Broadway shows as Wicked and The Book of Mormon and has directed operas, was a fan of Apparatus's and noticed Kenyon's work with the brand on Instagram. He reached out via direct message, and soon Kenyon had one of his firm's earliest projects.