Baiting Hollow Road Interiors, p. 133.
Photo: Annie Schlechter
Journey Through the Spectacular Interiors of Katherine Bryan
A comprehensive new tome opens the door to stunning residences from Park Avenue to Baiting Hollow conceived by the interior decorator alongside renowned talents Mark Hampton, Albert Hadley, and more
Great Inspiration: My Adventures in Decorating with Notable Interior Designers, by Katherine Bryan. Photo: Courtesy of Rizzoli
If, as society heiress Gloria Vanderbilt said, all decoration is autobiography, then Katherine Bryan has one fabulous story to tell. The psychologist and interior decorator has lived in and designed more than 20 homes, and in Great Inspiration: My Adventures in Decorating with Notable Interior Designers (Rizzoli), written with Mitchell Owens, Bryan features the ten that best portray a 50-year exploration of her style, identity, and character through collaborations with likes of Mark Hampton, Albert Hadley, and Susan Gutfreund, as well as Roberto Peregalli and Laura Sartori, who wrote the foreword.
“It is a personal pursuit that fills me with a great deal of pleasure,” she writes, “ the searching, the learning the acquiring, the recycling, the editing, the conversations, the inspirations….”
Katherine Bryan. Photo: Collection of Katherine Bryan
Park Avenue Interiors, p. 189. Photo: Francesco Lagnese
Indeed, Bryan’s evolution from “untutored and somewhat puzzled to experienced but still eager” over five decades is a testament to her passion for the subject. From Park Avenue to Palm Beach to Paris, the Kansas City native chronicles a life made more meaningful through a deep engagement with her surroundings. And what surroundings they are.
There’s the grand Long Island Georgian Revival she shared with former husband Shelby Bryan from 1985 to 2000. Bryan tapped interior designer Tom Britt as her collaborator, and together they realized a right-for-its-time chintz-and-Chippendale masterpiece. In Palm Beach, a Venetian Gothic palazzo known as Villa Venezia and modeled on the Doge’s Palace became Bryan’s when she married the late Damon Mezzacappa. With a gentle hand and help from Susan Gutfreund, she learned how to preserve the spirit of her husband’s past while combining her taste with his.
Baiting Hollow Road Interiors, p. 128-129. Photo: Annie Schlechter
The theatrical flavor of Italian interior designer Renzo Mongiardino’s work lives on in the Left Bank apartment Bryan collaborated on with Mongiardino protegees Peregalli and Sartori, who opened her eyes to the possibility that if something did not exist, it could be made. “I’d never before worked with a designer who made his own fabrics or prints her own wallpaper,” she writes.
Hers is a memoir of a personal aesthetic, but it is also a chronicle of important contributions to the history of interior design. But Bryan prefers to put it more humbly: “Every house, every room, and every garden offers you the chance to reflect on what came before and what is newly possible, what is right for you and your family at a certain time of life.”
See more images below:
Park Avenue Interiors, p. 194-195. Photo: Francesco Lagnese
Cover: Baiting Hollow Road Interiors, p. 133.
Photo: Annie Schlechter
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