Kit Kemp's "Design Thread"
At the start of her book “Design Thread,” Kit Kemp writes about Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” saying that it “left us with the valuable notion that, if you do not have a comfortable room and feel at ease with your surroundings, it is much more difficult to be creative.”
That sentiment is the basis of her book on “creating comfortable, functional, and well-designed interiors” - an art she calls “very often misunderstood and underrated.” For anyone who has spent time at one of the elegant and relaxing Firmdale Hotels designed by Kemp, the art of function and relaxation crossed with whimsy and ah-I-never-thought-of-those-things-together is paramount.
Her book is a tour de force of imaginative interiors from antique lamps with shades made from old maps and from “Much Ado” books to sunbursts of egg yolk yellow covering walls with “Sirenes” from the Pierre Frey Jean Lurcal collection.
For fans of The Whitby Hotel - and we count ourselves among them - Kemp lays out her design process for designing it. “New York can feel a bit like a battleground at times, so the feeling within our new hotel needed to be one that would pique the curiosity, delight all the senses in an adventurous and colorful way, and make visiting or staying with us worthwhile in every sense.” The book walks the reader meticulously through the myriad design “problems,” solutions and leaps of imagination for anyone captivated by the Whitby - including every single basket, hanging in an evocative jumble over the bar.