Peek Inside the Showhouse

By Linda Lee —

This year Holiday House is at 4 Windy Hill Lane. It’s in the quieter part of Bridgehampton, away from the beach, in the horsey area out near the Hampton Polo Club, off Millstone Road. The realtor and developer Christopher J. Burnside has built a 10,000-square-foot speculative house on a one-acre lot. It has European windows, Hamptons shingles, a pool, a waterfall, a chef’s kitchen.

He was eager to have people see the rest of the 23 acre parcel he owns, and the other six lots he hopes to develop with similar mansions surrounded by pastures and orchards.

Chris and Rebecca Burnside at the White Party (Photo Richard and Stephanie Lewis)

Chris Burnside’s speculative house, meet Iris Dankner, an interior designer and philanthropist who has been putting on Hamptons Holiday Houses for six years (with two years off for the pandemic). The Hamptons showhouse, with 20 design teams, joins Holiday House New York and table decorating at the Colony Hotel in Palm Beach in February, one night only. All to benefit the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and a Southampton charity, the Ellen Hermanson Foundation.

At the White Party: Christian Siriano, Iris Dankner, Andrea Stark and Jean Shafiroff (Photo Stephanie Lewis)

Note: the opening White Party Gala took place on August 10. The real estate company Brown Harris Stevens, a  sponsor of the show house, presented a check for $30,000 at the gala. Regular hours began Thursday, August 15, and run Thursday through Monday, 11 am to 5 pm through September 8. You can buy tickets here.  Admission is $40.

“It’s almost like a dating game,” Dankner said of finding the right house. “Builders are looking for press. This was a perfect match.”

Entrance to the showhouse, with landscaping by Frederico Azevedo (Photo by Madeleine Tavernier)

The house is huge, with eight bedrooms — bedrooms work well, because designers can express themselves fully.  “Bedrooms, you can close the door,” is the way Dankner puts it.

But the spec house has an open floor plan with the chef’s kitchen flowing into the great room which then opens to the family room, which sits across from the dining room. In addition, the 2,500 square foot area downstairs was mostly open, too, with window wells for light.

How do you divide up those spaces I asked Iris. “It makes it very tricky. Designers want to wow everyone,” she said. That means a lot of individuality.

“I have to make them speak to their neighbors and have it flow.”

The powder room by Fish Row (Photo Arturo Aranda)

One of her favorite spots, on the other hand, was the smallest, a powder room by Meredith Fish. “She did it with onyx. It’s really exquisite,” Dankner said. Visitors: the Fish Row powder room is across from the Jr. Primary Bedroom and next to the Garage.

Speaking of small spaces, Campion Platt, a co-chair of the opening night Gala, remembers when he was  invited to participate in the Kips Bay Decorator Show House for the first time. “I got two closets,” he says. “You start where you start.”

Campion Platt and Iris Dankner (Photo by Kristin Gray)

Which is not to say Meredith Fish, of Fish Row Designs in New York, is a beginner. She’s a veteran of Holiday House. As Campion Platt explains: “People choose to do bigger or smaller rooms depending on time, budget, shipping, logistics, support from venders –there are a lot of factors.”

And sometimes there is a perfect match: Where was Techno Gym and Briana Scott interiors going to go but in the gym in the basement, next to the light well, with strategic mirrors for self-admiration or self-correction.

The Great Room by Christian Siriano Designs (Photo Tim Lenz)

Christian Siriano, another co-chair of the gala, went big. Siriano Interiors took the gigantic open Kitchen, Breakfast Area and soaring Great Room. “I tried to treat my three spaces like one home, so the same person would want to live there,” Siriano said. Who was that person?

Perhaps not someone who lived in the Hamptons.

“The windows alone remind me of something in Colorado,” Siriano answered. “Maybe Aspen? So I went a bit warmer, cozier. The rug is all hand woven, textured. Warm, and cozy. Some of what we brought in is vintage that we reupholstered. Some of it we made custom. Kostas upholstery in Norwalk, Connecticut, really saved us. A daybed. A really big couch.”

Siriano said his colors avoided a typical Hamptons white: “I would say, very soft fluffy pink with some gray chocolate brown in the rug, and then a very light cream, beige.”

Mostly, with such a big space, he wanted the room to draw people together. “In these big houses,” he said, “you know, the bigger, the better, it begins to feel unwelcoming. Families sort of ramble around.”

A gift of the showhouse is the unexpected space. This year it is the laundry room by Shelley Cirkege Interior Design. Her attitude was simple: If I have to spend time there, I’m going to make sure I enjoy it.

Shelley Cekrige’s laundry room, on the same floor as the bedrooms. (Photo Kristin Gray)

Downstairs there is a theater, with seating and carpets by Stark and LGC Design, based in Huntington, NY. The carpeting is Missoni, which is exclusive to Stark and so are the throw pillows. Missoni means lots of color in the theater. Stark provided carpeting for the entire house if designers requested it, said Andrea Stark, the third co-chair of the Holiday House Gala.

“The showhouse is important to designers,” she said, “because it builds new relationships and elevates them, through Instagram and TikTok, to millions of people.”

Outside the theater is a serene “bar” that serves both as the theater’s refreshment stand, and as a downstairs kitchen when entertaining guests. It’s logical to think that teenagers would colonize the downstairs area. While no popcorn machine is visible, surely a microwave is hidden in one of those cabinets.

KA Design’s bedroom on the main floor (Photo by Marco Ricca)

Back on the main floor Iris Dankner is not afraid to play favorites. She has a favorite room: the junior primary bedroom, by KA Design Group in New York. (It’s opposite the powder room she admired, next to the garage.)

“It’s by Kenny Albert,” she sighed. “All black and beige. I’d like to curl up there and take a nap.”

Iris has noticed an evolution in design over the years in the Hamptons show house. These days there is more dark color, less white. “None of the rooms are strong white or cream,” she says. And yet the days of wild creativity are gone as well. No outrageous gimmicks, the kind designers pulled to make a name.

Platt agrees on that. “Ten or twenty years ago there was so much difference between rooms. Now there’s more commonality, a cohesiveness — even in Palm Beach.”

Guests at the White Party Gala: Susan Claudio, Jill Kandell, Julie Oliverio, Mary Quatroche, Elaine Saladino, Debra Halpert (Photo Kristin Gray)

And yet, show houses go against the needs of a developer. What a developer wants to show is a plain white box, the equivalent of muslin upholstery on a chair. Colorful Missoni carpets, cozy nooks that feel like Aspen may not speak to a Hamptons buyer who is ready to spend millions for a place to stable his horses and tend his beehives.

When the showhouse is over, on August 31, Chris Burnside may ask the designers to strip the rooms back down to bare walls.

“Sometimes they make us repaint to white,” Platt said. ‘Developers would rather have everything be vanilla.”