Red and green are one of interior decoration’s great love affairs. Opposite each other on the colour wheel, they sharpen and deepen one another: red brings warmth, glow and drama, while green adds calm, balance and a feeling of nature.
The secret is to avoid anything too bright or garish, and to use different shades of red and green that sit quietly together rather than compete. Faded reds, terracotta, oxblood and soft rose work beautifully with olive, sage, moss and bottle green. Together, with old carpets, textiles, old mellowed wood and lamplight, they create a timeless look that feels cosy, layered, lived-in, as though the room has evolved naturally over generations.
The first 5 photos by Alidad Ltd.
Photo 6: Michael Szell’s bedroom.
Photo 7: Room by Henri Samuel in Paris.
Photo 8: Buckingham Palace
#InteriorDecoration
#TimelessInteriors
#LayeredInteriors
#CozyHome.
#redandgreen
A wonderful way to understand the history of textiles is to study the fashion of the period.
Eighteenth-century dress offers a dazzling lesson in sumptuous materials: silk, prized for its sheen, softness and brilliant colour; brocade, richly woven with floral or ornamental patterns, sometimes enriched with gold or silver thread; lampas, an elaborate figured silk with bold woven designs; damask, where pattern emerges through subtle contrasts of shine and matte texture; lace, delicate and costly, used for cuffs, sleeves and trimmings; and embroidery, often worked by hand in silk, metallic threads, beads or sequins.
Many of these same fabrics were also used for furnishings, appearing as curtains, wall hangings, upholstery and bed coverings. In both dress and interiors, sumptuous textiles were at their most theatrical: shimmering, structured, delicate, embroidered and alive with history.
Fashion and furnishing fabrics together form a moving archive of textile art, telling us about craftsmanship, trade, status and taste through the language of fabric.
#18thCenturyFashion
#TextileHistory
#HistoricInteriors
#SumptuousFabrics
#DecorativeArts
Kenneth Jay Lane’s Park Avenue duplex was as dazzling and theatrical as the jewels that made him famous.
From the late 1970s until his death in 2017, the legendary costume jeweller lived at 23 Park Avenue, in the former Robb House, a Stanford White-designed Gilded Age mansion later converted into apartments.
His living room had once been the library of the Advertising Club of New York. Into this grand setting, Lane layered paintings, books, animal prints, textiles, silver, ceramics and exotic objects, creating an interior somewhere between a New York salon, an Aladdin’s cave and a very elegant tent.
Born in Detroit in 1932, Lane turned costume jewellery into high glamour, dressing everyone from Jackie Kennedy and the Duchess of Windsor to Elizabeth Taylor and Princess Diana.
His home had the same wit, confidence and fantasy as his jewels: not merely decorated, but lived, collected and performed. After his death, its contents were sold at Christie’s: the final dispersal of a life devoted to glamour, humour and making fantasy feel entirely natural.
Disclaimer – These photographs are shared for inspiration and educational purposes only. Photo owners are tagged where known.
#KennethJayLane
#CostumeJewellery
#ParkAvenueStyle
#NewYorkInteriors
#timelessinteriors
The Samuel-Novarro House, Los Feliz, California
Designed in 1928 by Lloyd Wright, the architect and landscape designer son of Frank Lloyd Wright, this remarkable house brings together the romance of old Hollywood and the discipline of great architecture. Built for Louis Samuel, business manager to Ramón Novarro, it later passed into Novarro’s hands, who commissioned Wright to expand the house and gardens and brought in Cedric Gibbons to create its Art Deco interiors.
Set into the Los Feliz hillside, with its terraces, pool court, oxidised copper details and sculptural concrete forms, the house feels at once dramatic and deeply private. After years of changing hands and periods of neglect, it was revived by Diane Keaton and later restored with great care by Justin Krzyston, preserving the spirit of one of Los Angeles’s most evocative house
@timstreetporter
Disclaimer – These photographs are shared for inspiration and educational purposes only. Photo owners are tagged where known.
#lloydwright #samuelnovarrohouse #historicinteriors #oldhollywood #interiordesign
The Bergl Rooms at Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna.
Created in 1769 for Empress Maria Theresa’s summer apartment on the ground floor of Schönbrunn, these enchanting rooms were painted by Johann Wenzel Bergl, a Bohemian-born artist celebrated for his illusionistic mural decorations and exotic painted landscapes. He transformed the rooms into a fantasy world of foliage, birds, trellises, garden vistas and imagined scenery. Rather than feeling enclosed, the interiors seem to dissolve into an elaborate painted garden, blurring the line between architecture, decoration and nature.
What makes them so extraordinary is this sense of theatrical escape. They are at once Rococo, exotic and deeply atmospheric, turning a suite of palace rooms into something light, playful and dreamlike. One of the great pleasures of Schönbrunn, they show how decoration can transport us completely.
Disclaimer – These photographs are shared for inspiration and educational purposes only. Photo owners are tagged where known.
Mikhail Baryshnikov, born in Riga in 1948, is one of the most celebrated dancers of the 20th century. After rising to fame with the Kirov Ballet, he went on to become a defining figure at American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet, admired for his extraordinary technique, musicality and dramatic presence. Beyond dance, he has also made his mark as an actor, director and photographer.
His home in Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic, is set within Corales, the private residential community at Puntacana Resort & Club. Designed by architect Ernesto Buch, the villa combines classical and Spanish-inflected elements: arches, courtyards, colonnades and an ocean-facing façade with what Baryshnikov has called a “Romeo and Juliet” balcony.
The house is both a family retreat and a creative refuge. It includes a small studio where Baryshnikov has developed projects with dancers and collaborators. The story of the house began through his friendship with Oscar de la Renta, whose own Punta Cana home first introduced him to the beauty of the place. Together with his wife, Lisa Rinehart, Baryshnikov created a home that reflects memory, artistry and the warmth of Caribbean light.
Disclaimer – These photographs are shared for inspiration and educational purposes only. Photo owners are tagged where known.
#baryshnikov #mikhailbaryshnikov #kirovballet #caribbeanhome #interior
Gloria Guinness, born Gloria Rubio y Alatorre in Mexico in 1912, became one of the great international style figures of the 20th century. Married four times, her last and most famous marriage was to Loel Guinness, of the Guinness banking family. A celebrated beauty, Harper’s Bazaar contributing editor, and one of Truman Capote’s “swans”, she was photographed by Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, Henry Clarke and Slim Aarons.
But what is fascinating is not only what she wore, but how she lived.
Her houses formed a map of mid-century glamour: Paris, Épalinges near Lausanne, Manalapan near Palm Beach, New York, Normandy and Acapulco. Each interior had a different mood, yet all shared the same qualities: confidence, restraint and atmosphere.
In Paris, at Avenue Matignon, Georges Geffroy created an atmosphere of grand, highly edited elegance, with antiques, dramatic curtains and immense flowers. In Acapulco, she turned to the Mexican architect Marco Antonio Aldaco, who designed the famous white house of open-air rooms, palapa roofs, handmade Mexican furniture, textiles and tropical light. Her bedroom there included pieces by the Acapulco designer Sylvia Sargent, including a carved four-poster bed and side tables. At Villa Zanroc in Épalinges, designed by Swiss architect Jack Cornaz, the mood softened into chintz, comfort and pattern.
Her rooms were never simply expensive. They were portraits of a life: cosmopolitan, edited and deeply personal. Gloria Guinness understood that real elegance is not having more, but knowing exactly what to leave out.
#GloriaGuinness #InteriorDesign #DecoratingHistory #GeorgesGeffroy
Festoon blinds, or Austrian blinds as they were known in the grandest houses, belong to a tradition of European interior luxury that goes back to the 18th century. Those softly gathered folds, pooling in scalloped layers, were never really about practicality. They were about theatre, about the pleasure of a room that knew it was being looked at.
The finest examples were made in silk, velvet or damask, weighted with tassels and braided trim. Raised and lowered by cords and pulleys, they moved with a certain ceremony. Very different from today’s roller blind pulled down in a hurry.
They take their Austrian name from the Habsburg imperial court, which set the tone for aristocratic taste across Europe. As with Roman blinds and Venetian blinds, the name simply records where the style was most conspicuously associated with — and in this case, that means the ceremonial splendour of Vienna.
Victorian decorators kept them going, layering them with heavy curtains in rooms that equated richness with depth. They slightly disappeared in the 20th century, but have never entirely gone away. In the right interior, nothing else quite does what they do.
Disclaimer – These photographs are shared for inspiration and educational purposes only. Photo owners are tagged where known.
#festoon #festoonblinds #austrianblind #interiordesign #interior
Alidad shares his approach to choosing the lighting in his dining rooms, enabling the space to be multifunctional for different occasions and events.
Photography:
📷 @simonuptonphotos
📷 @james_mcdonald_photography
#diningroomdecor #interiordecoration #InteriorDesign #lightingdesign #alidad
Abandoned places of worship, photographed by Matthias Haker, locations undisclosed.
Painted vaults, empty pews, broken floors, shafts of light. The life that once animated these spaces has gone, yet decay here feels less ruinous than tender, as though time has become another decorator, softening splendour into memory.
Haker, born in Potsdam in 1984, began photographing seriously in 2008 while studying media computer science. Since 2012 he has worked as a freelance and fine art photographer, with a practice centred on architecture, landscape and decaying buildings. He keeps the locations of many sites private, to help protect them.
Photography: @matthias_haker
Disclaimer – These photographs are shared for inspiration and educational purposes only. Photo owners are tagged where known.
#abandonedplaces #churchinteriors #sacredarchitecture #interiors #matthiashaker
Fashion in 16th and 17th-century Old Master paintings was never merely decorative. It was a language of rank, wealth, morality and self-invention. In the 16th century, dress appears grand, stiff and architectural , ruffs, farthingales, slashed sleeves, heavy brocades, gold thread, seed pearls and precious stones creating an air of ceremony and control. By the 17th century, fashion softens into greater fluidity, with falling collars, delicate lace, lustrous satin, rich velvet, ribbons and softly draped silks suggesting ease and natural movement. In both centuries, painters used clothes not only to display luxury but to reveal character, status and aspiration.
#oldmasterpaintings #fashionhistory #16thcentury #17thcentury #arthistory
Helena Rubinstein, born in Kraków in 1872, was not only one of the great beauty entrepreneurs of the 20th century but also a remarkable patron of art and decoration. After building her empire in Melbourne, London, Paris and New York, she created interiors that were as bold and polished as her public image.
Her flats in Paris, London and New York reflected a taste that was glamorous, highly personal and intellectually daring. She mixed fine French furniture, lacquer, mirrors and luxurious surfaces with modern art and her celebrated collection of African and Oceanic sculpture.
Her Paris interiors were the most famous, particularly her apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, while her New York flats carried the same air of drama and cultivated display. London was an important stage in her rise, though its domestic interiors are less fully documented.
Rubinstein worked with important designers and decorators, among them the architect Louis Süe, Maison Jansen - responsible for her celebrated satin-lined Paris bedroom of 1937 - and, in an earlier and more turbulent episode, the young Ernő Goldfinger, who designed her Grafton Street salon in London and later furniture for her Montparnasse atelier. David Hicks is also associated with at least one apartment for her, though her greatest signature was always her own. These were not simply beautiful rooms, but interiors that expressed power, confidence and extraordinary personal taste. Photos from For Pilar and The New York Times.
Disclaimer – These photographs are shared for inspiration and educational purposes only. This is not an Alidad Ltd design. Photo owners are tagged where known. This is not an Alidad Ltd design. #habituallychic
#HelenaRubinstein #InteriorDecoration #Collecting #TimelessInteriors DesignHistory
