Robert Kime

One of the greatest things about working for yourself is that you can work without interference. I firmly believe that the initial instinct is the best in design, and when you make changes to accommodate a client, you may be weakening the concept.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

Antiques can be like an old overcoat that tells you about its life. When clients move into a new house, they must feel as comfortable in their rooms as when they put on an old overcoat.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

Any designer who does not appreciate or know about good food is not a very good designer. The planning of a meal and it presentation - the texture, the color, the tastes, the hot and cold temperatures - are the same concerns that affect an environment.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

Flair is a keen natural sense of discernment, a natural talent or ability that cannot be taught. One has it or not.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

[on taste] The ability to notice, appreciate, and judge what is beautiful, appropriate, harmonious or excellent; a sense of beauty, excellence and fitness.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

Any designer who does not appreciate or know about good food is not a very good designer. The planning of a meal and it presentation - the texture, the color, the tastes, the hot and cold temperatures - are the same concerns that affect an environment.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

Madeleine Castaing pretty much had it all figured out--leopard carpet looks good anywhere.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

...I couldn't work the way I do if I didn't have a shop. Geoffrey Bennison taught me that you need to be a dealer to be a decorator. It's another interest, cross-fertilization. It's not that I depend on stock, but it does mean that people bring things to me. An entire room could begin with an atmospheric carpet or fabric or object. It feeds something in.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

The magic of candlelight, the most subtle of all, is an exquisite addition to any and all lighting.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

Any designer who does not appreciate or know about good food is not a very good designer. The planning of a meal and it presentation - the texture, the color, the tastes, the hot and cold temperatures - are the same concerns that affect an environment.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

When you work for yourself, the design process is never questioned.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

Attractive designs can be found in almost any period... And certainly there is no arbitrary law which says that an eighteenth-century French chair and a Sheraton can't be used in the same room.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

Any designer who does not appreciate or know about good food is not a very good designer. The planning of a meal and it presentation - the texture, the color, the tastes, the hot and cold temperatures - are the same concerns that affect an environment.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

The criterion for using reproductions should be the quality of design.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

My approach is to combine everything suitable that gives a room the feeling of freshness, originality, and a more beautiful atmosphere for living.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

Red and green should never be seen!
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

If in doubt, take it out!
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

I wouldn't describe myself as a collector so much as a student of line and form and harmony.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

A foyer sets the tone... it either builds you up or lets you down.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

Decorating for yourself is agony. It's easy to figure out what will make someone else happy. It's easy to make someone else's dreams come true. But to get into your own head as a decorator is hard because you're exposed to so many things.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

Every home has its own pulse. If you live in it awhile, it tells you what it wants to be.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

You don't have to live in the best building on the block--sometimes it's better to face it.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

I don't like for art to be cornered. I like to be able to walk around the piece, to let it breathe.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

The dimensions of a table or a house are very important. Not, as the functionalists thought, because they carry out a determined function, but because they permit other functions ... everything that is unforseeable in life.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

A mˇlange of styles plunges a place into life.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

I decorate houses the way others paint pictures or write books. I can go into a house and tell you the social standing of the person who lives there, his degree of culture and who his friends are. I attribute my staying power to passion. You have to love people first, and then you have to love everything else. And you have to love a lot.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

I do a kind of psychological work before beginning a house. I have to know well the people who are going to live in it. I do something that resembles them.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

When you design a house for somebody else, you have to feel an affinity for them, because you must enter wholeheartedly into their private life.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

...if you make an antique too perfect, take out all the marks and rings on the surface, you remove all the memories.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

You could look at a room I've decorated and not be able to identify the changes but what I want to do is settle a room. It's like calming a baby or looking at a tranquil pond and not knowing that it was once a raging torrent.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest

I do appropriate, habitable rooms, with nothing in excess and nothing too perfect.
Robert Kime, Architectural Digest