For this year’s Kips Bay Decorator Show House Palm Beach, locally-based interior designer Jennifer Garrigues completely transformed a bedroom and bathroom space at The Fountain House, a Mediterranean-style home along Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway.

Garrigues’ room stands out for its statement-making use of rich colors, and carefully-curated mix of internationally-sourced art and accessories.

“I really love different exotic places and I love to make every room – especially bedrooms – sort of scrumptious, enchanting, and a little romantic,” Garrigues explained to the House Tipster team at this year’s show unveiling. “If you have a lot of things that catch your eye, it makes for a much more interesting and fun room.”

“This wonderful jade green is a color I saw in India the last time I was there, and I just fell in love with it,” she told us. “I just thought, ‘that’s going to be the background of my room!’ I love saturated colors, and I think they really show off paintings well. We have a white bed that I think looks crisp and beautiful in here, with a yellow-y lime green fabric on the headboard.”

“Just putting all these pretty, saturated colors together: the purples, the turquoises, the lime greens, the pinks, it’s sort of like a wonderful bouquet of flowers,” Garrigues added. “I think if you can do that in a room, and also have interesting objects around that you bought from all over the world, I think it makes it into something very cozy and comforting. You feel at home, you have an eye that travels.”

Photo credit: Nickolas Sargent

To create this delightful Kips Bay show house space, Garrigues imagined her client being a jetsetting type girl who traveled the globe – and was looking for an inviting and eclectic space to return home to.

“My inspiration was this wonderful girl that we made up: Veronique, her name was,” Garrigues explained. “She’s a blogger who writes, and she runs around the world and wanted to have a place in her native France that she could just come home to and feel as though she had that beautiful, exotic world around her. It was her place to land, her retreat.”

“Consequently, a lot of things in here come from different parts of the world, that [we imagine] she picked up on her travels,” she added. “It’s rather like a pied-à-terre for her.”

Photo credit: Nickolas Sargent

Before her days leading Jennifer Garrigues Interior Design Inc., the designer previously worked as a high-fashion model for brands like Christian Dior, Hanae Mori, and many others.

Garrigues said that her unique fashion – and business – backgrounds have influenced her work “enormously.”

“When I was working with some of the most sensational dress designers, not only did I travel a lot, but they taught me a lot about color, proportion, and basically the mixing of fabrics, which is very important in this particular world as well as the fashion world,” she said.  “I mean, putting together chiffon and tweed was not really the thing to do, when I first started off in the fashion business, but most of the designers did that. They mix every kind of fabric together, and as long as it all balances and all has the same hue, it was beautiful. It was a new, modern way of actually being able to go out, look great, and look as though you put yourself together well.”

“Like great blazers over jeans and chiffon blouses, we can do floaty curtains with all kinds of different textures and cottons together,” she added. When you’ve got the eye, you can create a fabulous room just as you would create a fabulous dress or suit in your wardrobe.”

Photo credit: Nickolas Sargent

In addition to her design firm, Garrigues now operates a Florida shop that helps bring her signature sense of style – and personal passion for worldly collections – to more of her clients.

“I have a studio and shop on Peruvian Avenue in Palm Beach,” she said of the space. “Peruvian Avenue runs parallel to Worth Avenue, so it’s just around the corner from all the hustle and bustle.”

Photo credit: Nickolas Sargent

“The reason I actually opened a shop is because I am a collector,” Garrigues said of her inspiration. “I mean, I think they call people ‘hoarders’ nowadays, but I’m not quite like that! I just love to travel, and I love to collect things as I travel. I usually go to exotic places, apart from Europe which we all love. I go to places like India, Africa, and Morocco: all those tantalizing places where you see lots of color and different types of handcrafts. So there came a point when I couldn’t actually fit anything else into my house, so I moved it all to my shop.”

“I have great excuses for going traveling, because I buy things for [the shop], and I think people love it because not many people can travel, but they can still find something unusual and fun to put in their house,” she added.