I cannot tell you how much I admire what you do and how you do it. And Stephen's sort of like laid back, and you wonder, gosh, how does he get it all done? You get so much done, And.
I'm laid back because my head is turning all the time about what I have to do.
Stephen Sills is one of America's pre eminent interior designers. His work has been featured in numerous publications, and he's a member of Architectural Digests AD one hundred since nineteen ninety nine, with three different editors. That's pretty impressive, and he has been named one of their thirty Deans of American Design. I'm lucky to live close by to Stephen out of New York City up in Bedford, New York.
His beautiful home has been called the sheakeest house in America, and he has a stunning garden that always evolves and always inspires me. Joining me at the News and studios to talk about career and of course home and garden design is my close friend, my neighbor, and someone I deeply admire and have fun with. Stephen Sills. Welcome to my podcast, Stephen. It was great to be here. Very
nice to see you. Stephen was just a tad late because this little beautiful studio where we're recording is right next door to Christie's, and Stephen wandered over there to look at the huge art sales.
Right. Oh, it's a temporary impression. Impression, there's gorgeous stuff.
Oh really, what do you buy in?
What do you have your eye on buying anything? What do you have your eye on? Saw a great Sayson painting that is so undervalued. It's great, great drawing from Degas and it's very small little things, but they're just masterpieces. They're really beautiful.
Well, it's so nice. I have to wander over there afterward. So Stephen, it's so much fun to sit down with you and talk shop. I've known you for years. I have followed your career avidly. I've your books. Stephen has beautiful books that he publishes with Rizzoli, and the latest one is called Stephen Sill's A Vision for Design. I like that very much. And in that book is a conversation with Martha.
Stewart, who is that woman? Oh?
I love that conversation. That you had a very very fine writer working with you on the text. David David Netto, he's a good writer. He's such a good ride. Yeah, he is. And Stephen always chooses a very fine photographers who capture the sensibility of each of his designs. So with each project. Tell us about the process of photographing the projects that you the homes you create with your clients.
Well, it's a wonderful process because I feel like I'm not tunting my home in just saying the thing. I have studied decoration all my life. It's been a passion since I was sixteen. I understand what it's about, what the atmospheres are, what takes it to get there, all the different different styles of the periods. And I like to take along the clients with me when I'm set up for a job, and it's always creating a new
picture for me. I loved art when I studied art, and I wanted to be a painter until I was like eighteen, and then I went into the materia design phase. You're a good painter, Well, thank you.
I see Stephen when I sometimes visited him on a job, He's on a scaffold like Leonardo da Vincia, but the ceiling painting a special finish on the already painted finish.
I love doing that.
It's so great. It's so great that you actually mix the paints and mix the colors and are you're a totally hands on decorator. Totally Yep, totally. And if he doesn't like the color of a piece of furniture it might be a beautiful American early nineteenth century sideboard, he'll paint it. He'll paint it to go with the decord that he has created for the client. And you know what, it always works, it does. That was magical. It works.
And you experiment a lot in your own house. Why don't you describe that you have a really beautiful home in Bedford, New York, and it has evolved and evolved and evolved that home.
When did you buy it? When the Gulf ward broke out and it was bedlam and no one was going to Bedford. But it was so beautiful, this eighteenth century village in America that they preserved the buildings, it's a historical site. It was just I love the hills and the rolling land and everything. I stopped in and real estate office and I looked at fifty houses and bought this nice big blocky dilapidated house, but it had such beautiful land and it had a magic to it. I
can't really explain it. There were beautiful trees on the property and it was overgrown, and they were over broken down cars with trees growing through them. And there were a tree growing through my garage that I'm into a guesthouse. But it was just a lifelong project, and I love projects.
Yeah, you do Stephns like I am in terms of latching onto something like a house and then working and working and working on it until it is near perfection. Right, You'll never be done with that house, never though, because he adds garden after garden and wall after wall and path after path and now that fountionion. I envy the fountain you just put in with as so pretty. I've looked twenty eight years for those pieces, yeah, and found them. You know, it's really I love that. But you grew
up in Oklahoma. Now there's no land like that in Oklahoma.
No, But it was a wonderful experience and I didn't know how grateful I should have been to be in a small town in Oklahoma on the border of Texas. I could get to Dallas very quick. My family took me back and forth all the time to our lessons and everything, and there there was so much culture going on in Dallas. Then at the time.
Your mother and father were both artistic, well they were, yeah, and that rubbed off on you. I guess.
My grandmother had four sisters that were all artists.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah, and they were doing One was doing the paintings in San Francisco, one was doing a pottery in Dallas, Texas, ceramics. So I sort of grew up with all this stuff.
Nice And what age did you know that interior design was your calling?
Probably sixteen seventeen. I loved to paint though. I loved paintings and pictures.
And you went to the University of North Texas and then you left and went to Paris.
Well, my dad experience like phenomenal. My parents said, if I could, I was a terrible student, I'll exceled in art and architecture and the creative things. You've got to get a degree, and then for your present, we'll send you to Europe. So they did, and I lived there for two and a half years, coming back just to Christmas. And it was the most agrical experience of my life. I mean, just seeing a whole different way to look at things. And did you work there or just yes?
I worked, well, not really. I was having a lot of fonts what I was doing. But I had this friend, Hank Grimillion, that was so wonderful. He was from Texas City, Texas, and we met there. I didn't know him before. He was painting for Monjardino, the great Italian decorator, and he was working on the Hotel Lambert, and I was new to all this faux painting, and you know, it just opened my eyes up about interiors. I mean with paint.
I mean the Italians did it, you know, in the Renaissance, created marble and facades and faux wood, and I mean it's all like a theater set. So that was a great lesson to me early on and decorating paint and the deceivement of textures and materials could be used in decoration.
And you use it.
Yeah, you still do it in your front hallway.
Yeah, and it's so beautiful, but it is part of it is part of decorating.
For some designers, nobody knows how to do it anymore. That's true.
That's true, except for Stephen Sill's and Stephen Sills Workshop. Well, you left Paris after two and a half years.
I came back to Dallas because I went to see my parents and they said, you know, I wanted to go to New York City, but they said you should stay here. You're still young, you should get some experience here. And so I worked for a designer in Dallas for two years. Then after two relationships, I moved up here to New York because I had strangely enough, I was
I had clients at that age. I was like twenty four friends of mine, my own age, that were moving to New York, and I did their apartments to people of the Lawrence is Jim Lawrence and Debbie Lawrence.
And you got your work published very early on very early, which was extraordinary at that time because people were struggling, I mean, young interior designers struggle. They worked for the big names. Oh, and you got your stuff published right away immediately because you were so charming or.
So good, so good because he was so good. No, that was great. I did. My parents bought me a beautiful little townhouse in Dallas, very contemporary, and I changed it over and I'm decorated and everything and you know, I just had the nerve to take pictures of it. I think I will the Polaroid camera and send it to House and Garden to Lou Gropp, who was the editor at the time, and I said, I'm such as such a you know, it's such as such, I'm moving to New York. Here's my house in Dallas. Would you
be interested in publishing it? I love your magazine, He wrote back to it immediately, of course, we would love to do this house.
Do they publish it with those pictures or did they send a photographer?
They sent Oberto si Le really up to me.
I loved he.
Was such a great photographer still is. I was doing all of this between probably I was twenty eight by that time. That's the first thing I got published.
That's fantastic. So then your career began to cook in New York City by the age of thirty. Yes, who were some of your clients early on?
My first apartment was a New York magazine. It was just a square box room with a little kitchenette and a bathroom, and it was on eighty third between Park and Madison. And I was always going into the Metropolitan Museum, and I got that published. I sent it to man Hog and I said this, I only have a world of interiors. Wow. And I said, a man, you don't know me, but I'm Steven Sales and I'm a young decorator in New York. I just had this small apartment
and I said, have you ever been published before? I said yes, I'd had my house in House and Garden. And immediately she got some body to go get it while I was still on the phone with her and looked at them and she said, yes, this is great. And she said, just send me pictures of the room. I said, it's it's just one room apartment, but there's great shots. She did eight pages in one room apartment.
Well, I want to see that. I've never seen that.
I've shown it to you.
I have never seen that. That would be so interesting. So so after.
That what happened is what was very interesting. And a Winter called me No. I met her in the D and D building, this shewroom when she took over House and Garden afterlu grawk. Then she ran some stuff of mine with Jed Johnson, and Jed was a wonderful friend of mine, and he came to Dallas to see my house so many years ago, Charming great decorator, and Ian Schrager called me on the phone.
And who had given you? Who had given him your name?
SAWD the magazine in the World of Interiors, and he said, Steve, I'm doing this hotel. I didn't know who he was. And then he's you know, studio Fishy for I said sure, he said, Ian Schrager ran in. I said, oh, yeah, now know who he is. Yeah, I'm doing a hotel with Philippe Stark and I'd like to talk to you about helping me out with this. So I went over there met him Charming, and I just bought a new on sale Armani's suit and I remember putting that thing
on and going to meet Ian Schreeger. He says, Dave, you look great. Her mommy was so funny, and we just got along and he had these problems with these rooms and.
Okay, ro yes.
So he needed me to do the fabrics and the colors and everything because he couldn't interpret Philip's He just wanted Philip just did sketches of how he wanted everything, and he couldn't speak French. And I had met Philippe in Dallas actually because he did the Start Club in Dallas when I was in Dallas, and we got along and I did that. I did all the work for that hotel with Ian, and he introduced me to a
lot of fancy people. But then the great thing he did is he said, this is the client you need to have, and she's doing an office and she needs help. Nan Swid. Nan Swid was style icon and she created all of these ceramics and plates.
Her.
Yeah.
Great fan of hers. Yeah, married to a very very wealthy man. Yeah, really just enabled her to really do her art right, do her art. And so you did her apartment. I did her apartment that spectacular. She still lives in that same apartment, doesn't she.
She was on Park Avenue and I kind of helped her with that. I did her office. Then she said to me, Stee, when I wanted another apartment, I want to get out of here. It's okay. So I went looking and we went to eight thirty four. I didn't know what what a fancy building it was, but there was an apartment there and it was spectacle. I mean the architecture of the space. And that was the first greatest project.
Oh and I saw it way back then and then I recently saw it with you, and it has just that that that kind of apartment, with that kind of architecture, and that kind of design of yours really just evolves over time. It you can take something out and put something else in and it just it changes it, but it doesn't ruin it at all. Yeah, a beautiful, beautiful space with a magnificent views looking over Central Park.
Incredible, and that was and I did four projects with a swims.
Her beautiful house in the Hamps. Yeah, it's amazing. It sounds so casual, and yet it couldn't have been casual. I mean you had to build an office, you needed other designers, you needed bookkeepers and all of that to keep this, this absolutely burgeoning business going.
And I'm still doing it.
Yes, you are still doing it and busier than ever. Stephen is working on a amazing projects right now. Palm Beach, London, New York, Greenwich. I haven't even seen these places, but I hear about them, which is so interesting. I love to see the finished product in your next book.
I have enough things right now that I could do another book.
Yes you do this, oh yeah, but you're already you're photographing, yeah, which is great. But so Stephen takes design as as sort of a life work. And you create, you design, you meet with clients, you understand what they're all about, right, and then you I guess you're sort of a cooperative designer. You seem to really listen to your clients.
I do, yeah, because I think that to me, everybody says what is your style? I hate that one say what is your style? I said, I don't really want to have a style. It's the client's house. And I love inventing their personalities and their desires and how they see themselves in living in a house and what works. And that's what I love more than anything.
And I think they like it because they really get to express themselves to you. They do, Yeah, they do. Yeah, you're one of those designers that listens, and you also work with their collections exactly. I mean Stephen's clients are extremely wealthy with beautiful art collections. What about that family that had a house in Long Island and had a house in Palm be.
Oh, they're so wonderful. A Leonard and Susan fine Steak.
Yes, And I remember seeing some of those projects. It was incredible because you really worked in and around their art right, which was amazing to do, and kept walls big enough for their beautiful paintings.
It's a hard balance. It's really difficult and very time consuming to figure it out to work with people that have great collections because it has to work well with a house.
And then that very elected couple on the west coast of Florida.
Oh, the bal mcgaudiel was wonderful.
I know. And again, uh, listeners, you can you can look at all these beautiful, beautiful homes in Stephen's books once called Stephen Sill's Decoration. One's called Stephen Sill's a Vision for Design. Your other book, which I don't have a copy with me, that little one, yeah, the small first one I Dwellings, Dwellings. And now you're working on a fourth book which will which will incorporate some of your newer work. But I must say your work does not look old or new in any of these photographs
because you each work is a work of art. Each house is so different from every other house. It's so amazing. And at the same time Stephen is working on his own major project, which is this beautiful home in Bedford. And what I'd really like about you is that you don't move away from there. You don't have to. You don't have to split your time and go to Majorca. No, would you want to?
No, I don't want to. I don't know now. I don't want another house anyway. Yeah, I sold the house and my little apartment in Miami and got rid of that because I never went there. And you can go to a hotel, and I don't want to stay any place more than a week. There's so much to see, right, there's so much to see.
Yeah, I'll call Stephen and he says, Oh, I'm I'm in Paris for the weekend looking for stuff.
Oh I'm in Hawaii looking at plants.
Yeah, oh, I'm really down in a brazil and ebo looking for for nineteen fifties furniture. Yes, that's what you do all the time. You're a very curious person. Very yes, good detriment. So what's the first thing you do when you go to see somebody's house and say, I want to buy this house and I want to redo it.
Tell me the steps?
Because the steps every every designer has a different, different type of program to use on a project.
Well, I'm flattered that they call me in the first place. So I'm trying to be as charming as I can and truthful as I can be. When I see them and meet with them, I think what I look at most of them is who they are and the vibes I get of how they want to live. And then I look at the house. I look at the bones first, and it's all about the architecture to me in the first if there are any imperfections or something could be better, those are the things that go on on my mind.
And sometimes I jump the gun and start telling them I tear this out and make this bigger. I'm more subtle now and not just frighten them to death. But I think it's all about the architecture, and you need the right spaces to hold your family and make it, you know, useful. And thinking about the kitchens. Everybody leaves in the kitchen. You have to see if they do and if it's functional, and and the bathrooms and you know, just the basics.
You have to have clients you have, do they really live in their kitchens?
A lot of them do? How nice they do?
I live in my kitchen, I mean that's the most used room in my house is the kitchen. But My kitchen is really a utilitarian cook's.
Kid, a real kitchen. Yeah, it's so glorious that kitchen. It is glorious.
But Stephen has this glorious kitchen too, But he has a big couch in his kitchen and a giant TV and a car, chairs and a fireplace always lit. And my kitchen is not like that. I have a small television and a little desk and the rest of it is all workspace.
But it's totally perfect for you because you're a master chef, you know how what you're doing, and you're an artist with food, and that's what So when people are when they come to your kitchen, they'd rather look over the counter and watch you cook or talk to.
But in your house, everybody goes and watches documentaries while people while they're fussing around cooking something exactly. I like how you adapt to the spaces to the client's needs.
It's so important. And you know, where do they sit, where do they want to live? Do they want to television in the I mean everybody has to have a TV.
I just saw a new apartment that Stephen just did, two or one one apartment building away from mine, and two young young men with two young children with a beautiful apartment. Very spacious by the way, But boy, it really works, that apartment.
It does.
Yeah, the children have playspaces, they have their own each child has a bedroom with a playroom, and the kitchen is so nice. Everything in that apartment. I was just astonished at how and how quickly it came together. How long did it take you to work on that?
It was like a year and a half. But you know, it was a great apartment to begin with. And I have to give Peter Moreno did all.
Of that, Oh, he did it originally.
He did it originally and laid that I.
Had had dinner in that apartment many years ago with the former owner and it was so beautiful, hung with great art exactly, yeah, beautiful. And then all of a sudden a young couple with nannies and little babies has moved in and it's light and airy, and was the living room always in the back? I don't remember that.
There was always in the back. I mean, everything was exactly like it was one. I guess Peter did it. It was so good. There was so many good things about it that we just we didn't have to change the moltings, the doors. We lightened the floors totally. We put new windows in that living room to make them bigger and just solid pain. Those are beautiful because the apartment was dark, but they wanted a very light apartment.
And you know, I can see from my building, I can see the back of their building.
Really.
Yeah, it's so weird. But what's more impressive than just the architecture is the decoration because you really know your upholstery. You really know this that you look at the size of the people and you make their furniture fit them exactly.
What's very important. Yeah, but you saw customers furniture.
Yeah, custom furniture, but beautifully upholstered with the most beautiful fabrics and beautiful rugs. But it's not everything is You don't have everything made to order. You find antique rugs too.
Oh absolutely.
What bothers me about some designers is that nothing ever made is is quite good enough for the job at hand. And too many of them have every rug you know made. There are beautiful carpets.
Oh my god, there's so many. And there's nothing like an old rug, a really good quality. It has been worn in beteena. You can't you can't do you.
Treat furniture like works of art.
I do.
Yeah, And that's and when you walk into Stephen's own house, you should see the amazing furniture. All that desk in your library amazing, and that pair of chaises in your in your living room. And then Stephen just added an addition onto his house. He made a ballroom. Now what are you going to do in the ballroom. We haven't had a ball yet.
Well, we entertained Tina Turner were we had both dinner and I hosted it.
Yeah, that was very fun and she loved that. But that was a dinner part. Now you have to have a ball. You have to have a dance in there. Oh God, are you looking.
Forward to that?
Oh?
You just gave me a big room to decorate. You know. I always wanted a double cube room that had those proportions.
So double cube.
Yes, that's what that is. That's what it is.
It's so beautiful. So you started that project during COVID lockdown right, Yeah.
But no, you know I finished the architecture right before COVID hit, and then it was so great because I could finish the decoration.
Yeah, there's that's where he was up on the scaffold. I remember, yeah, exactly pain. And then the next place I saw you on the scaffold was at Dominique Bluehorn's house. Dominique is a dear friend of mine and and.
She you got me that job. I did get you.
That job because when I saw when I Dominique Hauld purchase this beautiful estate with talk about fabulous trees and landscape. Yes, I mean an amazing, amazing uh almost an arboretum, and the house needed a real almost a tear down, and Stephen suggested an architect, and that architect did a beautiful job, big beautiful rooms. A woman, a youngish woman with four grown children and uh and her husband had died and she wanted she wanted a big life change, and you
made it happen her. Her house is really one of the most charming houses. And you helped her so much. Did you see the Bedford magazine story.
I haven't seen it yet.
Oh oh, she she credits you for making that house her home, which is what Stephen is so good at making a house a home. And it was transformed, and and you became her close friend too, which is nice. That would you say that you create with your clients oftentimes a lifelong friend, you do because you're you're intimately involved with her with their lives and their and their their next projects and what.
Oh.
Yes, you'll be her friends forever. Yeah, forever, because you've made her house a home. Yeah, that was a cold house when you took it. It's now so utter to so beautiful. Yes, Monique says that somehow Stephen knew what I wanted in this house, even though I couldn't explain it, And she got that feeling from you, which is so incredible that you have that talent.
And know talking to her, I could get the vibe what she loved because she loved Mediterranean style and her her mother was French and she loved the Mediterranean and I could I just get the color she needed color in that right?
I talked about changing the color of a piece of furniture. You did that several.
Times in that house, many times. Yeah.
I used a lot of her old furniture that she already had. It so beautiful. And Tina Turner, did you go to Switzerland and really do that whole big house of hers?
I helped her. I did the house in the south of France first. Oh, and then she moved to Zurich with her husband. Beautiful house, and now she just bought a huge, big property on the lake, like ten miles up from our old house. The quality of it is so beautiful. Those Swiss know how to make stainless steel kitchens and bathrooms, and there's elevators. I mean, it's exquisite, you know.
And you also worked on a museum in West Tennessee for her. I did is that her music museum.
It is her music museum, and it was the schoolhouse and I did it for her wedding present. I told her, what did you do in it? Well, she had tons of her memorabilia for you know, photographs and all the great people she had met along the way. And then all of her great iconic costumes are all put it behind glass cases in this schoolhouse. And just had the glamorous incompass in the glass box and then you could see through it and you saw the rough planking of
the old schoolhouse and the cotton fields behind it. It was an interesting project. I really enjoyed it.
So who in the design world influences you? I mean, you influenced so many, But who are the people who really influence you?
Well, I think it's older decorators that I've always looked up to. I loved Billy Balden when I was growing up as a kid. He was just and I got it wrought off. I mean, it was just a cleaned up version of life, you know, It's just peared down and clean and honest. And that's the kind of the direction I always sort of focused on. But I went to France because I wanted to meet Charles Sevigne, who I worshiped. It worked with Evy Doll in the know. I was in contemporary stuff until I lived in France.
Then I got interested in real decoration by both painting by Montortino and Georgia. Fois is a great French decorator, and that's somebody that I always go back to and study his quality and just the attitude of decoration. I'm really a Franco file. I love England, but you know in this country, the majority of decorating it's inspired by England Puritanical.
Yeah, because then it came to America and became American furniture. Right that looks so much like English, the chipp and Dale and right, all of that. But the French are more eclectic, very interested in the whole world. What part of your environment do you like the best, the garden or the house or the what part my gardener?
Absolutely, you know that little greenhouse. I love that greenhouse.
But that's that was a reconstructed old greenhouse. Yeah, where'd you find it?
I I found this great guy in Boston that refurbished old cast iron greenhouses, and he found one. I talked to him. Page Dicky turned me onto. But I wanted an old cast iron one because the house was built in the nineteen twenties and this greenhouse was built in the nineteen twenties, so I wanted to connect it.
It looks like it was always there.
It was there.
Yeah, Stephen has this amazing hillside that is a sort of a semi circle all the way from bottom to top of concentric circles or half circles of beach hedge. Now, where'd you get that idea? Where'd you just make that up?
I did not make that up? Oh where'd you get it? I totally ripped it off from.
That the great Belgian Oh really, yes, does he have one of those someplaces?
He did it in one of his books, and I just thought it was so beautiful and.
I never noticed that in his books. I better get my first.
I'll find it and show to you because I thought you just I mean you had this space. I mean you had that zone. I had the hill in this semi circle. And what happened that was a whole forest of pine trees and there was a mini tornado that came through Bedford and it just went right through that forest and took them all out. And it took three years to clear the trees out to do that.
But that's working so well, it is, that is working so well. So you call yourself, what do you clear yourself? A designer or a decorator?
Then call me anything they want. I don't care. Well, I like decorator because all these people when I was growing up in the eighties and everybody, everybody was a designer. Oh no, I'm not a decorator. Well, of course you're a decorator. What difference does it make? But there's this language a designer decorator, you know.
Well, we have to we have to give our listeners some concrete ideas. That you get an apartment, what do you look at first? It's an empty space? What do you, as a decorator look at first?
The proportions and this and the architecture and the doors, the windows, Where does the light come in? Where does it where is it dark? And that sort of thing. That's what I think about.
And so I'm the client, what do you what do you suggest? First?
Is it? Is it flooring? Is it walls?
Is it lighting fixtures?
It's probably no, It's that's way down. I think. I think bathrooms are very important in apartments, and I think in an apartment, I think the door swings are very tricky, and because in apartments you have a lot of hallways, wasted hallways, and I hate that, and I just I concentrate it on the architecture totally and the details of how it works, you know, how that can improve. Then I start thinking about the personality of the client and it starts turning in my head about very quiet minimalism.
Contemporary would be good for them, or it could be like a more rusticated contemporary thing, or you know, just kind of plan of the thing in my head what I think they should live in. The materials. Oh yeah, no, I do boards. I'm one of the only people that do boards, because they're like compositions of paintings. For me, and if they look good on a board, they're going to look good. The fabrics, pieces of furniture, the floor plan, the wall finishes, the flooring finishes. That's how I work,
and I put it all together as a composition before it. Ever, it's excellent.
Have you photographed all these boards, a lot of them. You should do that.
I do photograph them. I'd like to see that. But that's where you can get that clear concept of what you're doing.
And don't ever ever thrown up their head and said, oh, this is totally wrong.
They look at it and they say it's very beautiful. And then they'll say, I wake up, like you know, I've been at about that fabric for the sofa. Can we try something else?
I remember the only time I've well, the only time I've used a decorator is a designer decorator was from my little Pia Terra in New York. And I had never never dreamed of having a high end decorator.
You can do it yourself. Well, I didn't know it. I didn't know at the time if I could or not.
And it was.
You know what you love and your stuff.
But at the time I had it all drawn up and it was totally wrong for me. Yeah, they were totally wrong, and I had to tell them it was wrong.
But that's good.
While you're the decorator, it's okay. And it frightened me to death. So but people, if you're out, if you're there, and that ever happens to you, don't be afraid. There's always Stephen Sills waiting outside that could take your beautiful, beautiful space and turn it into a magical kingdom. But it's really true. It's just like it is. It is so intimidating sometimes to think of you of working with a decorator.
But people shouldn't be you know. I just got a call from my office. This sweet girl up in very close to Bedford, but I think it's one of the smaller towns than she said. My husband and I just bought this little house and I've loved your work so much. And you know, I have a very small budget, but I would love for you to help me. But I don't think, you know, it's a big enough budget. But I just called her back on the phone and talked
her through it and I said, come in. Yeah, because she was somebody in the house was beautiful, she had taste and a low budget that I didn't think I could work with. But you know, I just encouraged her.
That's nice, that's good. It is well, it's good to be able to be a teacher like that too. But your books, your books teach so much. Your work really does inspire so many people. And keep up the great work, Steven. I cannot tell you how much I admire what you do and how you do it. And Stephen's always you know, he's sort of like laid back, and you wonder, gosh, how does he get it all done? You get so much done.
And I'm laid back because my head is turning all the time about what I have today.
Right, well, you get it done and done extremely beautifully.
Well. I can't wait to see your new projects.
I cannot. I cannot wait to read your next book. You are amazing And if any of you are an interest in looking at Steven's work, you can see it in Steven Sill's Decoration Stephen Sill's a Vision for Design. These are his two newest books, published by Rizzoli, available on Amazon in bookstores everywhere. Stephen, it's so nice to talk to you for this long time, and I greatly appreciate it.
Thank you, have a nice night. My friend