Philip Gorrivan Design

Philip Gorrivan Design Interior designer and stylist, textile, wallcovering and furniture design. Based in New York City

Last summer, I visited the extraordinary Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, and found myself captiva...
09/23/2026

Last summer, I visited the extraordinary Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, and found myself captivated by a place where architecture, collection, garden and landscape come together with an almost intoxicating effect.

Created by Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild during the Belle Époque, the rose-colored villa is an exuberant interpretation of Italian Renaissance architecture, set high above the Mediterranean.

Inside, room after room reveals the extraordinary eye of a passionate collector: Sèvres and Vincennes porcelain, Gobelins tapestries, Savonnerie carpets, 18th-century furniture, works by Fragonard and Boucher, Tiepolo ceilings, and treasures gathered from across Europe and Asia.

It is wonderfully layered, deeply personal and unapologetically beautiful.

But then you step outside.

The gardens may be the greatest seduction of all. Nine distinct landscapes unfold across the peninsula, from French formal gardens and Florentine influences to a Spanish garden, Japanese garden, exotic plantings, roses and Provençal landscapes, each revealing glimpses of the Mediterranean beyond.
Béatrice conceived the great French garden almost like the deck of a ship sailing toward the sea.

Every turn offers another composition, another texture, another view.

What a feast for the eyes and the imagination, and a beautiful reminder of how powerfully a house and its gardens can tell a story together.

Small spaces can make a big impression.In this powder room at a recently completed project in Washington, Connecticut, m...
09/22/2026

Small spaces can make a big impression.

In this powder room at a recently completed project in Washington, Connecticut, my Desert Storm wallcovering brings depth, movement and character to the space, creating a richly layered backdrop that feels both distinctive and inviting.

Powder rooms are often the perfect opportunity to be a little more expressive with design. A smaller footprint allows for bolder choices, whether through colour, pattern or texture, transforming an otherwise overlooked space into a memorable feature of the home.

Here, Desert Storm does exactly that, adding beauty and character while giving the room its own distinct identity.

A good wallpaper does something paint rarely can: it turns a wall into a single, uninterrupted idea, with no second surf...
09/17/2026

A good wallpaper does something paint rarely can: it turns a wall into a single, uninterrupted idea, with no second surface competing for attention.

That thinking shaped my own wallcovering collection: nine designs built around the motifs I keep returning to in my work, oversized florals, palm fronds, hand-drawn latticework, each available in a range of colorways, with custom colors on request. Most patterns are in stock and ready to ship, so a room can go from idea to installed faster than people expect.

If you’re working on a project and want to see the full range, the link is in my bio, or reach out directly and we’ll help you find the right colorway.

In my Connecticut garden this past weekend, welcoming visitors as part of a tour benefiting Hollister House Garden There...
09/14/2026

In my Connecticut garden this past weekend, welcoming visitors as part of a tour benefiting Hollister House Garden There’s nothing quite like watching people wander through a space you’ve spent years building.

The whole garden runs on an idea I borrowed from Gertrude Jekyll and the English garden tradition more broadly: structure that gives way to meadow. Clipped boxwood spheres and stone walls hold the bones near the house, then the planting loosens the further out you go, nepeta, lamium and geranium doing the work at the edges, a forest of verbena rising above it all.

Morning sun gave way to rain by afternoon, and I’ll admit I was relieved the garden held its own in both. That’s the real test of a planting plan, not the best hour of the best day, but every hour.

Thank you to everyone who came out, and glad to have supported Hollister House in the process.

Twenty-five years later, I remember the morning of September 11 with a clarity that is almost impossible to describe.It ...
09/11/2026

Twenty-five years later, I remember the morning of September 11 with a clarity that is almost impossible to describe.

It was warm and sunny in New York. Not a cloud in the sky.

I worked on Wall Street, but that morning I had a meeting in Midtown. A coworker staying at the Marriott at the World Trade Center was headed straight to the conference at Windows on the World, and I convinced him to come uptown instead. He thanked me for years afterward. My wife, Lisa, was planning to attend too. She was pregnant with our son and wasn’t feeling well, so she was delayed.

I remember that conference room, though not a word of the meeting. What I remember is the television, and the disbelief that this could be happening while knowing that it was.

We walked out onto Park Avenue. The city seemed suspended, people simply walking, stunned.

I ran home to our apartment on 56th and Sutton Place, where our daughter was with her caregiver. Then came the waiting. The phones were down. I could not reach Lisa.

Hours later, she finally walked through the door. Her story is hers, not mine to tell, and I will leave it with her. What I will say is that we were terrified for the baby she was carrying.

Thankfully, our son was fine, and is grown and thriving now. I remain grateful that the four of us made it through together.

In those first days none of us was fine.

I can still smell the smoke. More than that, I can still taste it. That acrid taste hung over Manhattan for days. Even now, a certain smell takes me back to that week, and the feeling that the world we knew had changed.

And there was the grief. I lost several friends that day. People I was supposed to see at the World Trade Center, and others who simply went to work and never came home.

My experience was far from the worst of that day. Thousands of families suffered unimaginable losses. I tell it only because it is the September 11 that I lived, and the memories remain astonishingly vivid.

There will always be questions about that day. But there are some things I do not need anyone else to tell me, because we were there.

Never forgotten

Architects have understood the power of a ceiling for centuries. Fresco painters filled cathedral ceilings with entire s...
09/08/2026

Architects have understood the power of a ceiling for centuries. Fresco painters filled cathedral ceilings with entire skies. Grand hotel lobbies use coffered ceilings to signal scale before you’ve taken in anything else in the room. Somewhere along the way, most of us forgot that lesson: the eye reads a room from the top down before it reads anything else.

I call it the fifth wall. Every other surface in a room competes with furniture, art, and everyday clutter for attention. The ceiling doesn’t. It’s the one plane you can commit to fully, in color, pattern, or texture, and trust that the decision will still read clearly a decade later.

The rooms in this carousel treat the ceiling as a decision, not an afterthought. Swipe through and see what changes when you finally look up.

I’m often asked what makes a room truly successful. The answer, borrowed from the late Billy Baldwin: “Be faithful to yo...
09/03/2026

I’m often asked what makes a room truly successful. The answer, borrowed from the late Billy Baldwin: “Be faithful to your own taste, because nothing you really like is ever out of style.” It’s the same thinking behind the deep, saturated brown on the walls here, a color chosen because it felt right for the room, not because it was trending.

The owners of this 1920s Connecticut colonial are avid collectors, and over the years they’ve gathered pieces from all over the world. My job wasn’t to edit that collection down, it was to find a way for everything to coexist: working through the house the way you’d work a jigsaw puzzle, starting with the edges and building toward the center until each room came into focus.

That same brown carries the living room, tying together furniture and objects gathered from several different countries and eras. Elsewhere, deep-seated sofas and chairs built for comfort make a point Bunny Williams made years ago: rooms are for living, not just for show.

What makes a room authentic? It’s a question I get asked often, and it’s the one my book, Authentic Interiors: Rooms Tha...
09/02/2026

What makes a room authentic? It’s a question I get asked often, and it’s the one my book, Authentic Interiors: Rooms That Tell Stories, tries to answer.

An authentic interior isn’t about following the latest palette or recreating a photo saved to a mood board. It’s about the choices that only make sense for the person living there: the material chosen because it means something, a color pushed further than expected, a piece kept for where it came from rather than how it photographs. Those are the decisions that make a room feel true instead of staged.

That’s also how I approach every project I take on, building interiors around who a client actually is rather than a trend that will look dated in a few years.

Authentic Interiors: Rooms That Tell Stories is available now. If you’re thinking about a project of your own, I’d love to hear about it.

Some renovations start with color, and rarely does a color choice do so much work on its own. This Upper East Side clien...
08/28/2026

Some renovations start with color, and rarely does a color choice do so much work on its own. This Upper East Side client wanted rooms that reflected his creative eye rather than the ones he’d inherited. As a fashion and fine art photographer and documentary filmmaker, his own images kept returning to the same subjects: plants, trees, foliage.

That became our foyer: high-gloss spring green lacquer across the walls and ceiling, with dark walnut floors standing in for the forest floor beneath it. It took some convincing. Rendered in lacquer, the room glows.

From there, a single shade of off-white carries through every trim and molding across the apartment’s 4,800 square feet, a quiet trick that keeps a home this size feeling like one continuous space. In the living room, custom sofas in the spirit of Jean-Michel Frank, unlined curtains that let the light do the work, and the homeowner’s own photography hung to frame the windows.

This project is one of the stories behind the design decisions I explore in my book.

25 years. Countless rooms. Countless stories.Looking back through our archive, I’m reminded of just how many doors we’ve...
08/26/2026

25 years. Countless rooms. Countless stories.

Looking back through our archive, I’m reminded of just how many doors we’ve walked through over the past 25 years.

Each address began with a different client, a different architecture and a different story to tell. And while the rooms themselves span decades, styles and places, the philosophy behind them has remained remarkably consistent: create interiors with a point of view that are deeply personal to the people who live in them.

Here, a small selection of the work behind some of those addresses.

25 years of Philip Gorrivan Design. And still more stories to tell.

Address

333 Park Avenue South
New York, NY
10010

Opening Hours

Monday 10am - 6pm
Tuesday 10am - 6pm
Wednesday 10am - 6pm
Thursday 10am - 6pm
Friday 10am - 6pm

Telephone

+12122288242

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Philip Gorrivan Design posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category