DECORATING : F.D.R. House: Small Rooms, Big Challenges

Pull the curtains closed, turn out the lights and slip under the filmy white linens on Ronald Bricke’s towering, velvet-draped bed. But don’t doze off. The show has just begun. “In the dark, the bed glows,” said Bricke, designer to Broadway and real-estate moguls. “It’s like E.T. landed.”

That’s only the optical impact of a bed hung floor to ceiling with gossamer white fabric, then encased in charcoal velvet and placed free-standing in the center of his dark-gray room.

For a slightly eerier effect, flick a switch and start the movie projector hidden above your head. Nestle into pillows trimmed with rare, 1930s Venetian lace as a personal movie screen descends from the canopy overhead. All you have to do is stay awake.

“It’s your own private theater in bed,” Bricke said.

Bricke’s artful concoction of high-tech and old lace is the highlight of the 22nd annual Kips Bay Decorator Show House in New York. For the event, which benefits the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club in the Bronx, 14 of New York’s top interior designers and five artisans transformed rooms, landings and closets, though none with quite the elan of Bricke.

The impact of hard times on the decorating industry appears to have restrained even the most expansive of high-end decorators. Still, Kips Bay remains an exceptional, sometimes outlandish source of style and a context in which imagination need not be restrained by the pocketbook.

Take Bricke’s master bedroom. Technologically astute visitors will appreciate the Vidikron single-gun video projector, which has been adjusted to project on a 27-inch screen just 80 inches away. Mark Hader, owner of Audio Video Systems in Williston Park, N.Y., which devised the system, says the projector’s built-in line doubler allows it to produce “a phenomenal picture” at this distance. But figure $11,000 for equipment and installation. The bed is extra.

But even here, decorators face challenges, the location among them. This year’s show house took place in a five-story, double townhouse on East 65th Street commissioned in 1907-08 by Sara Delano Roosevelt for herself and her son, Franklin. A single facade hides identical houses that share a common entry, with dining rooms and parlors that could be joined, as well as a communicating door on the fourth floor. It was designed by Charles A. Platt.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt used their half until 1942, a year after Sara died. The house was purchased by Hunter College and named the Sara Delano Roosevelt Interfaith Memorial House. Student and community events took place there until 1992, when the house was closed for financial reasons.

Now, the Committee for the Restoration of Roosevelt House, which includes Roosevelt family members and friends, is exploring the house’s future. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Despite its lineage, the building wasn’t particularly grand from a decorator’s point of view. Except for the double parlor connecting the two houses on the second floor, rooms are smallish by Kips Bay standards. Moreover, the cove ceilings, at 9 feet, 3 inches, were unregally low.

“Most decorators of this level are dealing with better buildings than this,” said Scott Salvator, who bemoaned the lack of elegant detailing.

Salvator painted stripes on the ceiling of his guest room to heighten it and hung a Russian chandelier in the middle to give it the look of a tent. With his partner, Michael Zabriskie, he also draped 150 yards of Quadrille linen toile over dubious walls. The fabric is white, taupe and “shrimp pink” with a neo-classical motif.

Toile was the favored fabric of Charlotte Moss, who draped 50 yards of “Toile Venetienne” from Travers over a daybed and walls. Toile turned up again in a very bright tricolor from Manuel Canovas on the sofa of Noel Jeffrey’s library.

“Toile is the chintz of the ‘90s,” proclaimed Salvator.

No such fleeting trends were on Tom O’Toole’s mind when he designed the F.D.R. library, in which some books remain from Roosevelt days. “The upholstery should last 50 years,” he said. “Slipcover it in 10.” The valances and curtains could withstand “decades.”

The Aubusson rug, the antique table, the English-made sofa, the club chairs, the ceiling painting copied from a courthouse, the walls faux-painted to look like old sandstone, the fabrics from Boussac of France, all were designed to look timeless, as if succeeding generations of Roosevelts had lived there.

“Things have changed since the crash,” he said. “Suggested list prices in some decorator showrooms seem ridiculous.”

To hold down costs without sacrificing style, O’Toole said, he chose basic chairs “like a little black dress,” then added fancy details. A special pocket for magazines on a chaise cost an extra $50, he said.

To cut the seriousness, O’Toole added antique toy boats and tuned his radio to a jazz station. “I don’t think Vivaldi is what this room needs,” he said.