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These Stephen Sills’s Holiday Decor

You have to have some shimmer for christmas, says sills, who even sprayed the towering balsam fir in his Bedford, New York, weekend house with metallic paint for an antique effect. Nothing celebrates the richness of the season like gold and silver. A refined New York country escape glimmers with a curatorial combination of the simple and sublime. Let find out These Stephen Sills’s Holiday Decor below.

These Stephen Sills’s Holiday Decor

Season’s Sparkle: Stephen Sills’s Holiday Decor

For designer Stephen Sills, all that glitters during the holidays is gold and silver and bronze. You have to have some shimmer for christmas, says sills, who even sprayed the towering balsam fir in his Bedford, New York, weekend house with metallic paint for an antique effect. Nothing celebrates the richness of the season like gold and silver. That is once of These Stephen Sills’s Holiday Decor.

Season's Sparkle: Stephen Sills's Holiday Decor

Season’s Sparkle: Stephen Sills’s Holiday Decor

By creating a sense of occasion with luster rather than the more time honored scarlet, Sills keeps his country retreat just that a refuge for recharging creatively. I look at color with clients all day long, week after week. For my own space, I want a neutral palette. Even the presents under the tree are wrapped in craft paper, foil, and newsprint to keep with the achromatic theme.

Season’s Sparkle: Stephen Sills’s Holiday Decor

My mother loves Christmas and we always decorated for it. Keeping up the tradition is a childhood echo. Sills complements a treasured collection of ornaments acquired as a teenager with magnolia leaves, branches of dried eucalyptus, and heaps of pinecones collected each year from his family’s yard in Oklahoma and sent to him by the boxful. Out of these natural materials, he riffs on traditional wreaths, backing them with mirrors or filling them with pinecones. That is once of These Stephen Sills’s Holiday Decor.

Season's Sparkle: Stephen Sills's Holiday Decor

Season’s Sparkle: Stephen Sills’s Holiday Decor

While he is stylistically devoted to 18th century French neoclassicism, Sills is firmly rooted in the present and beyond. There are a jillion different references here, but they are not direct copies, and that’s the key. You have to study an idea and then reshape it to make it appropriate for a particular spot. Case in point: the living room’s plaster walls, which were hand scored to resemble fluting and add the illusion of height. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel but I don’t want to do things everyone else has seen.
Even though Christmas is about tradition, Sills is always looking ahead. Backgrounds date and you have to tweak them. I’m already planning my next redecoration. All of these things are going into a new setting. At the end of the day, the future is the only thing that is really interesting.

Season's Sparkle: Stephen Sills's Holiday Decor

Season’s Sparkle: Stephen Sills’s Holiday Decor

I like beautiful, real things, says the designer, who is famous for his refined eye and penchant for museum class antiques. To wit: In furnishing an intimate Christmas dinner for four, Sills dresses the table with hand painted Austrian egg ornaments, 18th century silver, and miniature silk wire trees he purchased at Home Depot. I’m totally democratic. The most important thing is to live with things you love, whether they are from a top Paris gallery or a First Avenue junk shop. That is once of These Stephen Sills’s Holiday Decor.

Season's Sparkle: Stephen Sills's Holiday Decor

Season’s Sparkle: Stephen Sills’s Holiday Decor

For Sills, the arrangement itself is paramount. I’m less interested in comfort than I am in pleasing my eye and relating shapes to each other. The crucial element, he says, is editing. It’s the most important thing in the world. By giving things room to breathe, it unleashes their magic.

Season’s Sparkle: Stephen Sills’s Holiday Decor

He’s taken the same approach with the house’s celebrated interiors. Here, subtlety reigns supreme. In the foyer, he achieved an attenuated brand of drama with a few quiet elements: chalky limestone floors, limed chestnut panels on the walls, and an overscaled dentil molding above. To hide the disparate pattern of volume bindings in the library, he lined his glass-front bookcases with deep blue painted bamboo. But even that proved to be too much. He soon repainted the bamboo white, with blue highlights quietly peeking through.

Season's Sparkle: Stephen Sills's Holiday Decor