famous home interior designers
richard mackenzie-childs:my name's richard mackenzie-childs, andi'm an artist. i design home furnishings. we just sort of always have justthought sometimes things that seem the most antagonisticare the most successful when youput them together. we're in the finger lakesarea of new york state. and we're in a 1790sfarmhouse. we moved here in 1980.
and i'm driving into thevillage, saw this abandoned farmhouse sitting in the middleof a field and thought it was perfect. so when we moved in,we had nothing. we just arrived withthree trunks. and so we needed not onlydinnerware, but then we needed tables and chairsand everything. and so we just startedworking. this is our daughter's bedroom,probably one room in
the house that predates all ofour work that ended up being known as mackenzie-childs. and you can see by the paintingon the wall, cracked as it is, this is actually theoriginal plaster of the house. so the plaster is from 1790. we kept everything thatwas original here. the beams in the livingroom and the windows. and everything that couldbe saved, we saved. this room was originallythe attic.
we were actually in indonesia,designing a line of rattan furniture, and this was thefirst piece we did. we were sleeping on these matsthat we ended up buying and gluing to the ceiling. so the area that wewere working in, they didn't have hotels. and that was theaccommodation. this armoire, which actually isthe door into the rest of our bedroom--
so you come up and go through. you come into the bathroom,dressing room area. this is victoria'sdressing room. we each had this box that we hadbeen carrying around for our whole lives. and so when we did this room, wedecided to take everything out of these little boxes. and we glued it all into theceiling of this dormer. everything up there relates tosomething that one of us did
at some point in our life. so a good example is this was anapkin from our first dinner at the white house. when we stripped this roomdown and got ready to do something with the walls, victoria's mother was visiting. and victoria turned to hermother and said, mom, i think you should paint thewalls to look like we're looking outside.
and her first reaction was, buti've never painted before. we're actually in thegarage that i'm now using as a studio. i probably work in here everyday that i'm up here. this is a little buildingwe call the studio. it's sort of sitting justoutside the main house, between the house andthe carriage house. and we've used it as astudio, as an office, as a place to sleep.
this is the picture of our housea few months after we purchased it. we were very excited about howneat and tidy it looked because we actually have a frontdoor now, and all the glass is replaced. this is one of the bathroomsin the carriage house. and this is a room thatvictoria decided that wallpaper should be paper. so it's literally paperglued to the wall.
with anyone in the visualarts, it's just constant refining and changing. and our life is justlike that. it's very fluid. -love home and design? make sure to subscribe tospacestv on youtube.