Interior designer Peter Dunham showed off his mastery of mixed textiles by creating a special card room and gathering place for the Kips Bay Decorator Show House Palm Beach 2019.
The House Tipster Industry team was able to speak exclusively with the designer at the show house’s recent press unveiling event, which recently celebrated its winter season opening in West Palm Beach, Florida.
“When you’re not from Palm Beach, you have a kind of fantasy about what Palm Beach is,” Dunham shared with us.
That fantastical inspiration informed the style choices made in this luxurious Kips Bay design space.
“I just thought about all those big old mansions here, or the ones in Southampton or Far Hills, New Jersey: they’d have a card room,” the designer said. “When you have these big houses, you have to figure out a use for the rooms. I wanted this to be a card room, where everybody would end up at the end of a party. A clustering of the bad boys or bad girls would all end up here.”
“I wanted a room that was atmospheric and dark, inspired by those paneled rooms that would have been one of the more moody rooms in the house,” he added.
Throughout the space, you will notice an emphasis on great furniture, beautiful textiles, and artistic wallpaper. Dunham has made his mark in each of these spaces, and showcases his skills perfectly for this show house occasion.
“I started my fabric collection about 15 years ago as an offshoot of my interior design work,” he said. “I was always doing custom prints for clients for projects, because I’ve always been interested in textiles and collecting them since I was a kid. Fifteen years ago, I figured out how to start having fabrics and the line has grown.”
“After doing prints on mostly linen for a lot of years, we now have Sunbrella wovens you can use outdoors or indoors. It’s one of the fastest-growing categories for us,” he added.
The patterned blue wallpaper sets the atmospheric tone for the room, and Dunham told us that his foray into the wallcoverings space is pretty recent.
“We started wallpaper about two years ago, and that’s fun too,” he said. “It’s more pattern design, but it’s different: the things that work on fabric don’t necessarily work as wallpaper and vice versa. It’s been an interesting learning experience for me.”
When he isn’t working with clients or showing off his grandest creations at show homes, Peter Dunham is operating Hollywood at Home, which blends together his love for designer textiles, custom furniture, and one-of-a-kind vintage finds.
“What’s good about the Hollywood at Home brand is that I can do the three things that interest me,” he shared. “One is textiles. I have mine and I have about seven or eight other indie lines that are all friends of mine. We sell together, and it kind of creates a fun community. It has vintage, which is what I really love doing, which is going out and finding stuff. And it has my furniture collection, which is what [my Kips Bay] pieces are from, my newly-introduced teak collection.”
This Palm Beach show house, Dunham wanted to make the space feel effortless and liveable to stand up to modern clients’ needs.
“For this room – because it happens a lot with my clients in Los Angeles, they want rooms that are very low-maintenance and indestructible – almost everywhere, we use a lot of my woven indoor-outdoor collection,” Dunham shared. “Because people can just take a sponge and go for it. That just makes it easy: you can come here and have drinks and not worry about your kids with sticky fingers or husbands with pizza. For me, those days of having a formal room where you can’t really live in, or worry about stuff being spilled, no longer exists, which is kind of really great.”
