DECOR : Show-House Rooms Have a Chance of Moving From Dream to Reality

Most decorator show-houses are about dream rooms, the kind you know you’ll never have.

But this year, there were rooms to emulate as well as ogle at the Kips Bay Showhouse, a rite of spring that has occurred in New York City for 23 years in old mansions awaiting new occupants.

Nancy Mullan, a New York designer who specializes in kitchens, turned to Ikea, the Swedish retailing giant, for a Scandinavian country kitchen and dining room. Since most of the reproductions from 18th-Century Sweden will be available at moderate prices, the room is in the realm of reality.

“I used the furniture because it was perfect for the room, not because it is inexpensive or by Ikea,” says Mullan, who traces her interest in Swedish country style to a recent book, “The Swedish Room,” by Lars Sjoberg.

Sjoberg is curator at the National Museum in Stockholm. The museum licensed the reproductions of the so-called Gustavian pieces dating from 1770-90, and Sjoberg consulted on the design of the collection.

In addition to the Ikea pieces, all in a light gray, Mullan used furniture and accessories from Country Swedish, a retail shop in Westport, Conn., and kitchen cabinets of her own design with a pale gray finish aged to look like country antiques.

Furthering the concept of simplicity, the windows were either bare or treated with a simple gauze curtain held in place with ribbons, a show-house idea almost as shocking as scuffing the kitchen cabinets.

Looking simple and being simple are, of course, two different kettles of Swedish meatballs. The walls, for example, are not just gray, but five shades of gray mixed for just the right effect. And the murals on the dining room walls were commissioned by Mullan in the same blue-gray palette as the upholstery and paint.

Minimalism was, nevertheless, a clear, if minor, theme at Kips Bay this year. Matthew Patrick Smyth, a designer in New York, turned a 7-by-10-foot bedroom with a postage-stamp-sized alcove into “the guest suite I wish was waiting for me.”

Smyth used a neutral color scheme to make the most of a small space. To create the illusion of a higher ceiling, he applied a slightly shiny silver leaf to it. Instead of paint or wallpaper, he put fabric on the walls.

“The acoustic properties of fabric create a sense of comfort by softening sound,” Smyth says.

He selected small-scale furniture and small, framed pictures in keeping with the room’s size and had stereo components built in to keep clutter to a minimum.

He mirrored one wall of a tiny alcove to make it appear larger. The mirror is mostly hidden by a table set up as a bar so it subtly adds a feeling of spaciousness.

Chuck Fischer of New York also used mirrors to expand on visual space. He glued mirrors to an interior window in a 7-by-11-foot room furnished as a sitting area. He also borrowed a trick from stage design by creating the illusion of a space beyond: He took the door off of a tiny closet, painted the closet blue and lit it to suggest a moonlit terrace just out of view.

New Age decorating is related to minimalism. Clodagh, a New York decorator who pared her professional name to a single word, created a New Age sitting room that managed to be minimal and opulent.

She appealed to the senses with a Buddhist meditation area with a working fountain, aroma-therapy in the form of lavender-scented candles, birds singing on audio and modern dancers on video.