The Collins Room

May 2016, New York – Sixteen years ago David Collins Studio created The Blue Bar at The Berkeley Hotel in London. The now iconic bar combined classical details by Sir Edwin Lutyens with elements of contemporary design and signalled a new trend in hotels with the birth of the destination bar.

At the Kips Bay Decorator Show House 2016, The Collins Room takes its starting point from The Blue Bar, and reinterprets the design for a private home while simultaneously paying homage to The Studio’s eponymous founder and his love of the colour blue.

Simon Rawlings, Creative Director of David Collins Studio, has set the tone for the house by giving the entrance hall a sense of grandeur and refined ease with playful touches that leaven the formality of the space. This is achieved through the unexpected use of colour and materials including a new interpretation of the Lutyens Blue panelling by Farrow & Ball using their Cooks Blue paint, the striped monochrome stone floor, and the David Collins Studio for Baker bespoke hand-screened Chiyogami wallpaper, created exclusively for the 2016 Show House in lapis, claret and gold.

The luxurious combination of colours and textures, which is the hallmark of David Collins Studio’s projects, is complemented by collaborations with The Studio’s partners Baker, Emily Thompson Flowers, Promemoria, Assouline and artist Alexander Innes, to take those visiting The Collins Room on a journey through the Studio’s visual world.

“It was a great honour to be invited to contribute to the 2016 Decorator Show House. The work that the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club undertakes, can only be admired, and is of such great importance to the disadvantaged children that the charity serves, enriching and enhancing their quality of life.

This has been a very unique opportunity to collaborate with a series of truly talented individuals, to realise a vision which is so important to me, and to The Studio, and to pay tribute to the project which started my career.

When The Blue Bar was created in 2000, it was heralded as one of the most iconic bar interiors ever created. David Collins, Iain Watson (our CEO) and I were taken on a journey as the bar took on a life of its own!

To take the signature Lutyens Blue colour as the starting point for The Collins Room was something I wanted to do to mark the importance of the project, to signal its timelessness and to create something truly iconic for the 2016 Kips Bay Show House.

I hope that The Collins Room is seductive, that it welcomes people into the Show House with its palette of blues and golds, and that people enjoy the curated series of artworks and installations that have been sourced and commissioned by our Studio with artists from the UK, Europe and the USA.

At The Collins Room, drama, theatre and timelessness feature in a home that all visitors can aspire to own.”