Some furniture has been repurposed from his parents’ homes—his father, a lawyer and entrepreneur, is another avid collector with a discerning eye—as well as his former New York City apartments. For instance, in the poolhouse living room, an 1840s Comtoise clock, from his mother, and a marble Jean Royère table, purchased at Bonhams, once anchored the parlor floor of his former Washington Square Park duplex (AD, September 2014). Meanwhile, the grayish-pink hue coating Casa Sandra’s dining room walls, Farrow & Ball’s Setting Plaster, covered nearly every inch of his and Farnsworth’s Brooklyn Heights address (AD, July/August 2019), which they relinquished during the pandemic. Looking at the three homes side by side, one can trace the evolution of Lippes’s own taste, which he largely credits to looking at great masters of decorating and what they did, naming Oscar and Annette de la Renta, Renzo Mongiardino, and Georges Geffroy as prime influences.
In the bedrooms, a surfeit of runway-ready patterned textiles—many designed by Lippes, who harbors ambitions of launching home fabrics one day—adorn the canopy beds, walls, and, in the primary suite, the ceiling, which is lined with a floral Robert Kime print. Visual palate cleansers also abound. In the sun-drenched kitchen, Lippes appointed every surface with dove-white Waterworks tile. And next door, in the formal dining room, a 1950s FontanaArte glass table lightens the space. “I like to mix everything,” he says.
In addition to antiques, furnishings here include accessories and fabrics from his collection with OKA. His clothing boutiques—including new storefronts in Houston and, as of this August, Palm Beach—also sell antique decorative objects he’s personally sourced. “My only issue is not keeping everything for myself,” Lippes admits of the retail model.
However revealing the rambling interiors of the main house, it is the estate’s poolhouse, a stone-path stroll beyond the formal English garden and an allée of lilacs, that may be most intimate of all. A veritable Petit Trianon, the hillside edifice—which Lippes modeled after the orangery at Hubert de Givenchy’s Le Jonchet—comprises a bedroom, bath, and live-work expanse. A hideaway within the larger refuge, it’s where the designer, whose namesake brand recently marked its 10th anniversary, goes to do what he calls “creative and thought work,” a meditative foil for the frenzied days he spends in the city and traveling each week. Once behind his 18th-century Swedish desk, gazing upon creamy panels created by a Buckingham Palace master plaster caster that he found two decades ago on a trip to London, and surrounded by his collection of books, it’s a wonder he ever leaves.