How It Started

Stephen Sills has made his way to the top of the decorating world. Luckily a new book follows the tasteful trail of breadcrumbs he left along the way.

- David Netto

Stephen Sills and I have been in a conversation for eight years. It began when I first wrote about his work in 2014, and it shows no signs of stopping. What started as an article and led to a friendship has now become a book, his third: Stephen Sills: A Vision for Design, released by Rizzoli this month.

I wrote the text, and in doing so I compiled my interviews with Stephen into something resembling his end of a series of conversations, like a diary. The first directive he gave me was that he wanted this to be a "teaching" book. It seemed the best way to do that was to get out of the way and just let the preeminent American decorator of our time use his voice. Sills, whose breadth of knowledge is enormous, could absolutely teach a course in the history of the decorative arts. To tide us over until then, there is his new book, with a foreword by Tina Turner and a chapter on gardening in conversation with Martha Stewart, as well as the passages excerpted here.

The house shown in these pages is a new project recently completed for Sills's dear friend and Bedford, New York, neighbor Dominique Bluhdorn. Introduced by Charlotte Worthy, the architect of the project, Bluhdorn and Sills connected right away: "What happened was more than decoration, it was a series of complex, fun, and beautiful moments. We were standing on ladders together, scrounging in the barn at 7 p.m. Sills mixed all the colors, in many cases applying the glazes and striés himself to give a handmade, bohemian quality to the rooms. The result is their take on an American country house: intimate, comfortable, and lovely, full of plants brought in from the garden, folk art, and quilts.