The decorator show house: where the magazines go shopping for trends
Charity show houses like Kips Bay let top designers build a room with no client to please. The shelter press covers them because that is where next season shows up first.
One of the least understood engines of interior trends is the decorator show house, and following the shelter press without knowing about it means missing where half the ideas come from. A show house is a real property, often a grand one, divided among many designers who each take a room and decorate it, typically to benefit a charity. The best-known is the Kips Bay Decorator Show House in New York, which has run since 1973 to support the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club and draws designers who compete, in effect, for attention; the San Francisco Decorator Showcase has done the same on the West Coast since 1977, benefiting a local high school's financial-aid program.
What makes a show house so productive of trends is the absence of a client. A designer decorating a real family's home negotiates with budgets, existing furniture, and someone else's taste. A designer given a show-house room is decorating for the press and for peers, which frees them to try the bold wallcovering, the painted ceiling, the saturated color they could not sell to a cautious homeowner. The rooms are aspirational by design and experimental by permission.
The shelter magazines cover these events intensively, and that coverage is the mechanism. A pattern that first appears on a show-house wall, photographed and credited, is a pattern being auditioned in front of the entire industry. If it draws attention there, it starts turning up in client work, in manufacturer marketing, and in the magazines' own trend pieces over the following seasons. The show house is a laboratory, and the press is how the results get published.
This is why a savvy reader treats show-house coverage differently from a normal room feature. A published family home shows what a designer will actually install; a show-house room shows what a designer wishes clients were braver about. The gap between the two is a fairly reliable preview. The daring wallcovering on this year's show-house wall is a decent bet for next year's more mainstream features.
The pattern repeats across cities and organizations, with regional show houses feeding regional titles the same way Kips Bay feeds the national ones. Anyone who wants to anticipate the shelter press rather than follow it should mark the show-house season on the calendar, because it is the moment the industry shows its hand before the trend is a trend.