Turning a Ceiling into a Tapestry for Kips Bay Dallas
I recently had the honor of painting a ceiling mural for “The Last Room” of the Kips Bay Decorator Show House in Dallas. Let’s dig into the full story!
The 2024 Kips Bay Decorator Show House in Dallas.
What is the Kips Bay Decorator Show House?
Much like the Met Gala allows fashion designers to go all-out on a grand stage, the Kips Bay Decorator Show House allows interior designers to show the world what they can do.
For over fifty years, the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club of NYC has been gathering twenty-five leading interior designers each year to put on a luxurious show house for the public to tour. The house allows each designer to to celebrate their own style with a unique and stunning space. In the past decade, additional show houses have been opened in Palm Beach and Dallas.
Medieval Mural Dreams
Shortly after getting picked to design for the 2025 Dallas show house, Sarah Stacey Interior Design reached out to me. Her plan was for a space that embraced curiosity as a design ethos and drew inspiration from places as varied as medieval Bavaria and the runways of Schiaparelli. As an artist with a master’s in medieval history and a love of mixing time periods, this very much lined up with my dream journal.
We dreamed and schemed our way into a full ceiling mural design that evoked the millefleur of medieval tapestries, with a helping of fantastical creatures to round it out.
After just over a month of planning, color testing, and sketching, I made the trek from New England to the Lone Star State to make this dream a reality.
As any artist knows, executing your plans is so much harder than planning. I crammed 200 hours of craning my neck on a scaffold, squatting on the floor to paint beams, and re-designing every element over and over into two weeks. This gave me ample time to appreciate Michaelangelo’s thoughts on painting a ceiling, as expressed in this strongly worded poem.
But as with every mural, there are more than enough moments of being lost in the magic of it to make up for the effort. Seeing the beams slotted into the ceiling design felt like hearing the Hallelujah chorus, not to mention the many moments of appreciating creating something as part of such an expansive larger vision. A vision which was fittingly dubbed “The Last Room.”
“The Last Room” in the Limelight
And what a vision! I am so lucky that my art got to play a part in such a transformative space. Sarah Stacey Interior Design knocked it out of the park and filled the rest of the room with so many intricate and fantastical details—a veritable wonderland of art and design.
And that wonderland got shared with the world!
Architectural Digest included a whole section on “Mythical Beings and Old World Motifs” in their article on Kips Bay Dallas. (Excuse me?!?)
House Beautiful put ceiling murals as number four on their list of “12 Trends We Saw at the Dallas Kips Bay Decorator Show House That'll Be EVERYWHERE in 2026.” (Couldn’t agree more and couldn’t be more thrilled.)
Veranda Magazine lauded the moody purples of the space as the number one trend from the show house. (Let’s paint the town moody purple!)
(I truly may never recover from some of these mentions!!)
Many Thanks
There were so many people involved in this transformative experience for me.
First and foremost, my thanks go to Sarah Stacey and her team for trusting me with the “fifth wall” of such a precious space. Their adventurousness and wonderful guiding ideas helped make this mural what it is. It was also made 1000% cooler looking by the miracles they worked with the rest of the room.
Secondly, huge thanks to everyone who helped and encouraged me on-site. Thanks to the Kips Bay employees for staying late so I could keep painting. Thanks to the construction team that literally built a ceiling for me to paint (and handled the beams with such care). Thanks to every designer and worker who stopped by to check on progress and offer kind words. And thanks especially to the person who showed this pregnant lady where the nice bathroom was on site.
Also, huge thanks to my ever-lovely online audience for cheering me on from afar. This job is largely solitary, so my internet cheer squad really makes a difference.
And finally, thank you to those in my life who have made it possible for me to pursue this path. It is projects like this that reinforce the feeling that I have very much chosen the right path for me. And I am so grateful for those who support it. Here’s looking at you, Milton. (My husband, for anyone wondering.)
What a way to close out the year! Here’s to more adventures in 2026!
*Note: Any photos that look good are definitely by Stephen Karlisch.
