The Georgia-born, New York-based design wunderkind Miles Redd states the obvious when he declares, "I love color." But it's more than that. "I love color relationships more than anything else. If I'd shown you a sample of taxicab-yellow lacquer, you might think it looked like shellacked dried egg yolk," Redd says, referring to the living room walls of an Upper West Side apartment he recently decorated, with his colleague David Kaihoi, for a couple with four young children. "But if you put it with blues and greens, soft grays and reds, it takes it down a notch and gives you the feeling of brandy held up to the firelight." Such sumptuous images are the designer's stock-in-trade. "I'm a romantic," he says. "I don't deny it."
"If you were to describe this place to me without my actually seeing it," says the wife, "it would sound like too much. But it isn't. It doesn't go beyond." Between here and "beyond" is a line on which Redd dances and occasionally pirouettes, decoratively speaking-appropriate enough for a fellow once photographed leaping across a mirrored room brandishing a top hat and cane.
The living room sofa's cerulean looks straight out of a Sorolla seascape… A slipper chair is the color of a rosy cheek, the blush of a Zorn portrait.
No leaping is required in this prewar apartment's entrance hall to appreciate how gold and scarlet dashes in the otherwise pale blue-and-grisaille wallpaper recur in the living room's glowing walls, the vestibule's red silk lampshades, and Redd's signature upholstered leather doors. The wallpaper's sky reappears as soft blue curtains framing views of Central Park. Needlepoint screens and chintz meet contemporary counterparts in the dining room's white-plaster chandelier by Stephen Antonson and Saarinen marble-top table. "I love the way he mixes things," the wife says. "It keeps things up-to-date," adds Redd, whose love for the tactile and traditional doesn't cloud his affinity for the bold and new.
"Romantic" does not mean rigid. In fact, the Romantic movement in the arts was a reaction against the disciplines of classicism and the Enlightenment and a celebration of individual expression. How fitting that books stacked on the library table (when not in use for homework sessions and holiday dinners) are devoted to the likes of John Singer Sargent, Joaquín Sorolla, and Anders Zorn, artists whose careers spanned the vividly innovative eras between the Romantic and the modern. That Redd's rooms might be rendered from any of those artists' palettes is as intentional as it is gratifying to his client, a painter herself. The living room sofa's cerulean looks straight out of a Sorolla seascape; the white ruffles of the master bedroom's curtains catch the light just the way a dressing gown might in the hands of Sargent. A slipper chair is the color of a rosy cheek, the blush of a Zorn portrait.
Architect Thomas Vail's artful combining of two apartments to create this one made Redd's job that much easier, for flow is about composition and sequence as much as color. In aiding that flow, Redd says he thinks of himself as a painter, too, "trying to arrange the colors of the rooms in and around the apartment so that there's a connection between them." A connection of color, yes, but also to a deeper sense of comfort and cosseting-one that makes city living both bearable and beautiful.
This article originally appeared in the November/December 2015 issue of Veranda. To tour the entire home, click here.
