The first time Maryline Damour designed a showhouse space, she encountered a problem most interior designers might happily trade their fabric samples for: Nobody was telling her what to do. No client’s favorite color to accommodate, no beloved furniture to work around, no competing household visions to reconcile. She could do anything. Naturally, she invented a client.
“I was so tethered to that,” she says. “Like, where do I even begin when you have all the freedom in the world?”
That liberating, occasionally unnerving proposition runs through the eighth annual Kingston Design Showhouse, open weekends October 17 through November 1 in Saugerties. Designers selected through their portfolios get unusual latitude to pursue their own ideas. The homeowners still have a say in practical matters—they’ll be using those bathrooms after the visitors leave—but the showhouse allows participants to express parts of themselves that commissioned work might never reveal.
“For some designers, they’ve always had something they’ve wanted to express,” Damour says. Looking at their finished showhouse rooms beside their portfolios, she sometimes finds herself marveling at the difference.
This year’s setting gives them fresh material: a 1955 house on three wooded acres near Opus 40, with a stream, mature trees, and extensive interior woodwork. Its first homeowner was a carpenter; his handiwork remains throughout the house. After a succession of 19th-century properties, the building presents a different set of possibilities, including what to do with all that paneling.
In Madelaine Mayer’s living room, plum-colored architectural framework crosses the ceiling above a cream sofa, blue walls, and a dramatically veined fireplace surround. In Jennifer Salvemini and Nicola Whiteley’s “Teen Suite Dreams,” wood-paneled walls meet a glossy yellow ceiling, pink-striped bed canopy, floral bedding, and skateboards. Apparently, the teenager who lives here contains multitudes.
Damour, principal at Damour Drake, founded the showhouse in 2018 as a one-time effort to connect the region’s designers, makers, and suppliers. It became annual, attracted national attention, and began drawing participants from farther away. But the original purpose remains visible in the introductions happening within its rooms.
Marilyn LaVergne, who designed the hall bathroom, has a substantial basis for comparison. A former publicist for home-goods brands, she estimates she has visited at least 50 showhouses, often accompanying reporters or pitching designers’ rooms to editors. “This is one of the few that I think really focuses on what’s local, what’s available that’s local,” she says. “There’s really great local sources everywhere.”
In her bathroom, local sourcing extends to the backyard. Hickory from the property, milled at Woodstock Wood, became a live-edge shelf and wood backsplash. Ceramics by New Paltz artist Nicole Jurain join peach-colored walls, asymmetrical mirrors, and sculptural lighting from Hudson Valley Lighting Group. (HVLG provided lighting fixtures throughout the house.)
Connections can redirect a room. Designing the primary suite, Audra Viehland and Michelle Sabin of Sabin Viehland spotted New Paltz ceramic artist Helen Prior on the sponsor list. Viehland knew Prior’s ceramics; she hadn’t known about her wallpaper. That discovery became the suite’s starting point.
Prior’s Peg Dot wallpaper covers the walls and ceiling in rows of tiny dots, lending the expansive bedroom a delicate rhythm without competing with the woodland views. Beyond them, October supplies its own fairly extravagant decorating scheme. Drapery surrounds the bed instead, providing softness and privacy without screening the trees. A freestanding bathtub sits beneath a broad window framing golden foliage.
Building the adjoining bathroom required a network of contributors: a stone sink from RT Facts in Kent, Connecticut; a custom vanity by New Antiquity; brass plumbing fixtures; and labor-intensive Moroccan plaster. Coordinating donated materials and skilled labor meant asking people to contribute—and then asking whether they could possibly do it tomorrow.
For Tiffany Glasco of Nahla Madison Home, the showhouse offered a chance to introduce herself to a region where she hopes to work more. She traveled from St. Louis, though the East Coast is familiar territory: She lived in DC for a decade, and her husband spent 10 years in New York and New Jersey.
“I love the artsy aspect,” Glasco says of the Hudson Valley. In four weeks, she transformed the kitchen with black cabinetry, oxblood accents, floral wallpaper, and a tiled island, reorganizing an awkward layout to accommodate cooking, seating, and storage.
For Saugerties artist Marcie Paper, the assignment meant designing her first room. Her handmade mudroom brings together hand-painted walls, block-printed curtains, custom ceramic hooks, and paper-flower garlands devised to disguise seams in a newly constructed wall. “It was a very stressful thing to wrap my head around,” she says.
Outside, Amanda Russo Rubman’s sculpture garden continues the invitation to experiment. Hannah Vaughan’s sculptural chairs gather among the trees, while Eileen Power’s The Flying Trapeze sends bright pink ladders zigzagging through the air between trunks. Suspended above the ground, these tools of everyday work become an improbable route into the canopy. “The most rewarding part of all of this for me has been watching every artist just exude pure joy,” Russo Rubman says. “No boundaries.”
Some furnishings and artwork will depart when the showhouse closes. Paint, wallpaper, built-ins, and other permanent improvements remain; event proceeds benefit building-material reuse organization Circularly. The professional introductions may have an even longer life. Salvemini and Nicola Whiteley, collaborators in this year’s bedroom, met at the 2020 showhouse. Sometimes the most consequential thing you find in a beautifully appointed room is another person.
The Kingston Design Showhouse is open October 17-18, 24-25, and October 31- November 1, 10am-4pm, in Saugerties. Tickets are $38.
