Playing the Part

June, 2023 | By: Rachel Hurn | Photography: Thomas Loof

In The Elegant Life: Rooms That Welcome and Inspire (Rizzoli, 2022), interior design heavyweight Alex Papachristidis showcases his gracious, arresting, and totally unexpected interiors, from a Manhattan apartment made to feel like a homestead set in nature to a contemporized neoclassicist flat near the Acropolis. The known tastemaker is described in the book’s foreword by his good friend Harry Slatkin—deemed the “king” of home fragrance by the New York Times—as a person for whom “everything is always bigger than life, very Auntie Mame, but done with great care and deep affection. If Alex had a motto, it would be ‘Live, live, live!’” The sentiment rings true when paging through these projects, down to the last tabletop setting (another of Papachristidis’s talents).

Here, the designer was commissioned, along with architect Kitty McCoy, to create a playhouse for clients on Long Island who wanted a sweet little getaway hidden in the garden for their young granddaughter. This one, which has double-hung diamond-pane windows and operable board-and-batten shutters referencing the family’s main residence, comes equipped with electricity, air-conditioning, and even a phone. Papachristidis describes the charming morsel as being “a soaring space washed with a confectionary palette of pink, fuchsia, and Marie Antoinette blue,” which he outfitted with antique children’s furniture found at auction. “It’s so good,” Papachristidis writes, “I honestly wouldn’t mind adapting it into an actual house.”

You may not be able to build quite such a grand—not to mention separate—play space as this one, but Papachristidis seems to be telling us that, with a few carefully chosen touches, such as this floor painted in homage to one painted for Pauline de Rothschild in the 1970s by decorative artist Graham Carr, you can make each space one that brings you that same joie de vivre.