Show Notes
Samuel Cochran, Global Features Director at Architectural Digest, joins the podcast to discuss his book, American Designers at Home. The book offers an intimate look inside the personal residences of 20 influential American interior designers, including Kelly Wearstler and Ken Fulk. Cochran explores how these professionals use their own homes as spaces to experiment and recharge, free from client demands, rigid timelines, and external expectations.
Specificity of Place: Rather than relying on red, white, and blue clichés, Cochran noted that modern American design is often defined by a deep connection to local architectural history and the surrounding environment.
The Freedom to Experiment: A shared American design ethos is the freedom to pull references from anywhere, honoring the past while maintaining the irreverence to break the rules, mix styles, and live with what you love.
Embracing the Journey: Many of the featured homes were born from transitional life moments and evolved slowly over years, proving that even for top designers, a home is a process of trial and error rather than a polished overnight success.
Ken Fulk (Provincetown, MA): Known for his polished, maximalist client projects, Fulk's personal waterfront home is a crumbling, weathered refuge where he preserves the historic house's peeling wallpaper and patina.
Roman and Williams (Montauk, NY): Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch’s home reveals a wild, time-worn connection to nature that contrasts sharply with the slick, romantic commercial spaces they are known for designing.
Jessica Helgerson (Paris): Helgerson embraced thrift and creativity in her small Paris apartment, hand-stenciling a bedroom mural and mimicking the building's basement millwork cutouts for her green kitchen cabinets.
Jean Liu (New York, NY): The Dallas-based designer created a quiet personal escape in a grand uptown Manhattan studio, utilizing the extra-thick walls of Joseph Pulitzer’s former Gilded Age mansion to create an acoustic refuge.
Markham Roberts: A masterclass in mixing styles, Roberts’s home is an eclectic, effortless mishmash that proves you have to truly know the rules of design history before you can successfully break them.
Cochran hopes readers walk away from the book remembering Dorothy Draper's philosophy that decorating should fundamentally be fun. You can follow him on Instagram at @samuelcochran and find American Designers at Home anywhere books are sold.
If you had the freedom to completely ignore timelines and expectations, which room in your home would you experiment with first? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from How to Decorate
Elizabeth Lawrence, partner at the interior design firm Williams Lawrence, joins the podcast to discuss her first book, Decoration, co-authored with her partner Bunny Williams. The book functions as a collection of essays that groups rooms by stylistic similarities rather than presenting individual projects, drawing inspiration from vintage French design books. To encourage readers to slow down and step away from screens, the physical book features a photo-free, linen-textured cover and pages that alternate between matte cardstock and gloss finishes.
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Scott J. Sottile, a partner at the prestigious residential architecture firm Ferguson & Shamamian, joins the podcast to discuss his firm’s new book, Transformations. Published by Rizzoli and written by Guy Trebay, the book highlights 15 distinct projects spanning from subtle restorations to radical rebuilds across the United States. Scott shares his deep passion for traditional architecture, which was cemented during his time studying Thomas Jefferson’s historic designs at the University of Virginia. He explains how to preserve the historical integrity of an old home while ensuring it functions seamlessly for modern, multi-generational living.