Inside the Homes of Tommy Hilfiger, Isaac Mizrahi, and 8 Other Fashion Designers

The life of a fashion designer isn’t exactly housebound. Between runway shows located around the world and the work of actually designing, it wouldn’t be surprising if a creative director’s own residential abode became an afterthought. But, of course, designers are people who care deeply about color, texture, and aesthetics writ large, so drab interiors would never do. Below, we’ve selected 11 of our favorite homes that belong to fashion designers—each of which showcases its owner’s unique aesthetic sensibility.

Adam Lippes’s Brooklyn Abode

“Modern stuff I just don’t understand,” fashion designer Adam Lippes says over coffee in the sun-splashed living room of his Brooklyn Heights apartment. “It’s just ugly.” So, defiantly, he surrounds himself with the atmospheric opposite.

A Victorian-style borne settee centers the space, like a white-and-blue water lily, and a Russian Empire mahogany bookcase stretches across one wall and nearly to the ceiling. The master bedroom’s main event is a custom-made canopy bed that channels the nutty Chinese Chippendale pagoda daybeds at England’s Stanway House, and Gustavian chairs ring a Biedermeier pedestal dining table. A Kentia palm—an arboreal accent beloved by another boldface fashion designer, namely Christian Dior—sprouts from a ceramic cachepot in the living room, its luxuriance, underscored by lacy wicker furnishings, evoking an old-fashioned jardin d’hiver, albeit one painted the palest shade of pink. 

The designer’s dedication to old-school style comes naturally. His mother was an interior decorator with a similar aesthetic point of view, and his father has long collected Biedermeier furniture and contemporary art. “I’m obsessed with furniture, obsessed, more than with clothes any day of the week,” Lippes says, adding that his treasures always end up influencing his fashions. —Mitchell Owens 

A Greenwich Village Spot for Isaac Mizrahi

My mother always told me, “If you want to stay young, live in the Village!" Brooklyn-born fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi says, standing in the living room of his 4,000-square-foot apartment in the storied Manhattan neighborhood. Outside, a sweeping terrace looks out over rooftops toward the city’s southern tip.

The home, set in a historic 1931 building just off Sixth Avenue, looks perfectly proportioned and brand new, but it is actually an amalgamation of three apartments that was 20 years in the making. Mizrahi (who on the day we meet has livened up his standard all-black ensemble with sparkly silver toenail polish) bought the first installment more than two decades ago, a few years before Unzipped, the 1995 documentary about his work, made him a star. Since that time his résumé has expanded beyond apparel and accessories to include serving as a judge on Project Runway All Stars, hosting the weekly QVC show Isaac Mizrahi Live!, and creating a line of upholstery fabrics.

Though Mizrahi would never consider hiring a professional designer—“I am the decorator!” he cackles—his decisions are not made in isolation. He lives with his husband of three years, Arnold Germer, who “also has big opinions,” Mizrahi notes, before adding, “but in the end he usually gives in.” (The couple share the home with their beloved mutts, Harry and Dean.) Architect David Bers played a key role in planning the layout. He and Mizrahi are good friends and work seamlessly together. Bers describes his client as “a functionalist, not a minimalist,” and jointly they were set on leaving the apartment’s bones exposed: They would never drop a ceiling or hide a gloriously rusted radiator. —Lynn Yaeger

Ulla Johnson’s Montauk Retreat

Ulla Johnson and Zach Miner can’t stop talking about their garden. “It’s a spring bounty every weekend with new things in bloom,” says the fashion designer. Her verdant surroundings, after four years of work with landscape guru Miranda Brooks, are finally coming into their own. Bulbs planted last fall are pushing up through the soil. Magnolia trees are blossoming. A flash of pink—the petals of a flowering cherry tree—is visible just outside the living room window.

The couple have relished the process. “A garden takes time to grow into itself,” explains Johnson. “Things move around and find their home. Things you plant come back in a slightly different place. It’s such a beautiful evolution.”

The same could be said of their home out east, constructed circa 2010 by MB Architecture, where they retreat on weekends with their three kids. Like the garden, it’s a little different on every visit: The modular vintage Mario Bellini sofa might remain in a leftover configuration from last night’s dinner party; a stray piece of driftwood—one of the family’s many collections—might end up in someone’s bedroom, thanks to their vizsla, Daphne; a new ceramic piece might arrive in a box, shipped home from a recent trip to Spain.

For about five years, they have steadily renovated and furnished the place in phases, with the help of architecture firm Studio Zung and interior designer Alexis Brown, always careful to keep it livable as they work—especially in the summers when they carve out time to surf, swim, hike, and entertain. —Hannah Martin

A Manhattan Home for Thom Browne

What do Elsie de Wolfe, Renzo Mongiardino, Harrison Cultra, Georgina Fairholme, and David Kleinberg have in common? Yes, all are boldface interior decorators of uncommon importance and signal influence, but more importantly, they all lavished their expertise on the selfsame house. That would be the redbrick beauty on Manhattan’s far East Side that architect Mott Schmidt created in the early 1920s for Anne Vanderbilt, she being a moneyed widow who was giving up her late husband’s fabulously pinnacled Fifth Avenue castle for something a bit less egotistical and a lot more elegant.

“The proportions are so magical—that’s what seduced us,” says Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and, with Anna Wintour, one of the forces behind the annual Met Gala). He and his partner, Thom Browne, the fashion star who was recently named the next chairman of the CFDA and who made headlines in 2018 when the Ermenegildo Zegna Group acquired 85 percent of his namesake brand in a deal that valued the company at $500 million, encountered the illustrious residence while house hunting a couple of years ago. Though they initially had Greenwich Village in their real estate sights, they kept being drawn back to Sutton Place. 

“Thom’s a good Catholic boy,” Kleinberg observes of his longtime friend, who always said that one day, the three amigos would do a house together. Surprisingly, none of the couple’s art came under discussion until after the furniture, carpets, and mirrors had been installed. “When I asked what Andrew and Thom owned, the most fascinating pictures began to come out of boxes—I was floored,” says Kleinberg, recounting how he, Browne, and Bolton eventually walked around, cradling pieces in their arms, and discussing where each would look best. “It’s a very old-fashioned way of doing things,” the designer adds. “The art wasn’t bought for the house.” —Mitchell Owens

Jenni Kayne’s LA House

The serene Los Angeles house that fashion designer and lifestyle guru Jenni Kayne created with Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen feels like a mission statement articulated in three dimensions. It tells you everything you need to know about her aesthetic sensibility, her priorities, and the DNA of her brand. With its spare, soulful volumes and its eminently calm, neutral palette of natural materials, the structure neatly encapsulates Kayne’s Cali-centric vision of gracious, effortless living. It’s a bravura performance, delivered sotto voce.

More than anything, though, the house is a proper home, a refuge Kayne shares with her husband, luxury real estate maven Richard Ehrlich; their three children, Tanner, Ripley, and Trooper; and a small menagerie of two dogs, goats, rescued mini horses, and a mini donkey named Walnut. “I learned so much building this place with Vincent—how I want to live, what matters to me, what makes the most sense for my family,” says Kayne, whose new book, Pacific Natural at Home, a love letter to great California houses and the women who created them, hits bookstores this month. “The house feels like a more grown-up version of me,” she adds. —Mayer Rus

A Hamptons Home for Joseph Altuzarra

Call it the battle of the Pinterest boards. “After we got this land, we went off and made our own Pinterest boards and then showed them to each other,” says Joseph Altuzarra, the acclaimed Paris-born, New York–based fashion designer. The project: building a dream getaway with his husband in the middle of protected farmland and at the end of a winding road in the heart of the hamlet of Water Mill in the Hamptons.

“Mine was very Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give. Gambrel rooflines! An ultimate kitchen! Hydrangeas!”

“And mine was a black barn; I’m a minimalist,” the husband, real estate developer and financier Seth Weissman, says with a laugh. “These poor architects.”

What could have led to marital discord ended in architectural harmony. “This is the love child of the two,” Weissman says, pointing to the eight-bedroom house the pair and their daughters, two-year old Emma and just-born Charlotte, retreat to from NYC on weekends and during the summer. With the help of Matthias Hollwich, founding principal of HWKN Architecture, Altuzarra got his beloved cedar shingles on a stark five-point roofline, which, at Weissman’s request, doesn’t feature trim, shutters, or gutters. —Derek Blasberg

Tommy Hilfiger’s Palm Beach Slice of Paradise

Tommy and Dee Hilfiger are no strangers to waterfront living. For years the designer couple took respite at a Golden Beach, Florida, home with 100 feet of ocean frontage, and they continue to retreat to a vacation home on Mustique, where the estate’s swimming pool laps up against the sands of the Caribbean.

Still, when the duo decided to decamp from their residence in Greenwich, Connecticut (AD, March 2017), and make a full-time move to Palm Beach, Florida, last year, they pondered a new kind of frontier. “We fell in love with this home and the fact that it was on the lake and on the lake trail,” says Dee, referencing the west side of Palm Beach overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway, Lake Worth Lagoon.

The couple’s chief Palm Beach residence—how many people can say that?—is a 5,000-square-foot three-bedroom Mediterranean-style house built in 2006. There are columns and arched ceilings everywhere you look, along with plenty of courtyard nooks and verdant gardens. The couple turned to AD100 designer Martyn Lawrence Bullard to help open up and reenvision the space. “We built the look around the location,” notes Dee. “Something fresh and easy. The palette: coral stone ivory. And it’s a beautiful Spanish/Mediterranean-style home, so Martyn brought in some Moorish accents, and we’ve also got splashes of blue and white.” —Ariel Foxman

Stacey Bendet’s Upper West Side Apartment

The first thing you see upon entering Stacey Bendet’s home is a stupendous portrait of her three daughters, painted by family friend Julian Schnabel. But look down and you will notice baskets on the floor in front of this magnificent work of art. Each is labeled with the name of a family member—there are even receptacles for Blue the dog and Princess the cat—and meant to hold those things (Crocs, socks, etc.) that are the fabric of everyday life.

Such is the delightful paradox of Bendet’s apartment—stunning and palatial, for sure, but also a living, breathing family refuge. Bendet, a fashion designer and the founder of the clothing company Alice + Olivia, and her husband, film producer and investor Eric Eisner, along with daughters Eloise Breckenridge, 13, Scarlet Haven, 11, and Athena Belle, 6 (and of course the aforementioned Blue and Princess), moved into this grand 6,800-square- foot space in the legendary Dakota on Manhattan’s Upper West Side just a few months ago. But that was after a massive three-and-a-half-year renovation, a labor of love—though, as with any project of this scale, it had its unique challenges.

The Gothic glory of the Dakota might be a tad intimidating, but there is nothing frightening about Bendet’s living room. “I wanted a place that felt grown-up and maintained all the elegance of the building but also was fun for friends and family,” Bendet says. “I didn’t want a big apartment that was made for adults and where you couldn’t jump on the sofa. My kids do cartwheels and flips in here. I wanted it to feel lived in.” Indeed, a glance at the sage green velvet sofa reveals a bold Blue traipsing along its back.

Bendet worked with her friend, the interior designer Louise Kugelberg, to bring the space back to life. “I guess it’s my own version of an international style,” Kugelberg says, explaining the home’s eclecticism. “There are Venetian chandeliers, Spanish carpets from the ’30s that came from the Ritz Hotel in Madrid, contemporary paintings by Francesco Clemente and Jorge Galindo—and some by my husband, Julian Schnabel—and a 12-foot-long dining table made out of hand-painted tiles by Lola Schnabel.” —Lynn Yaeger

A Beach House on Fire Island for Derek Lam

Looking around fashion designer Derek Lam’s waterfront home, one doesn’t immediately think of sipping sake.

But that was key to the inspiration he shared with architect and interior designer Neal Beckstedt when they began working on this project together. Of course, Derek Lam being Derek Lam—a womenswear star known for combining elegant simplicity and exquisite detailing—this wasn’t just any sake.

“In the beginning, I told Neal that my favorite drink was this sake at [the New York City restaurant] Omen that they serve in a cedar box. It’s perfectly simple, and it has this beautiful cedar smell when you drink it,” Lam recalls. “I said, ‘Neal, I just want to live inside that sake box.’”

Ask and ye shall receive.

Now, Lam lives in the cedar sake box of his dreams. Together with his husband, Jan-Hendrik Schlottmann, founder of Italian fashion brand Callas Milano, and their Irish terrier, Roscoe, he’s made the most of the serene home’s 2,000 square feet of minimalist, modernist space—all of it considerably more comfortable and cozy than it might have been thanks to Beckstedt’s carefully thought-out use of warm, natural materials and sculptural accents. —Andrew Sessa

Pierre Hardy’s Parisian Apartment

“As soon as we walked in, we knew this was the one,” says the French fashion designer Pierre Hardy, wistfully recalling the moment he and husband Christopher Turnier (CEO of Hardy’s eponymous brand) set foot inside the Seine-gazing 17th-century hôtel particulier on Île Saint-Louis, a small island smack in the middle of Paris that they now call home.

They didn’t expect to fall for a place so quickly—after all, Hardy was exacting. There were just a few streets in all of Paris he wanted to live on. But even totally empty and, by all accounts, a bit of a mess, the approximately 2,000-square-foot apartment was bursting with life—elaborate mythological frescoes covered almost every inch of its soaring, nearly 15-foot ceilings. Apollo, robed in crimson, harp in hand, looked down upon the entrance hall. In the living room, Juno, wife of Jupiter, and Aeolus, Greek god of wind, lounged in the clouds, while Aurora, Roman goddess of dawn—resplendent amid a magnificent medley of cherubs and horses—presided over another room. The masterworks, attributed to the artist Bon Boullogne, best known for his easel paintings found at Versailles and the Louvre, were a serious selling point.

Hardy, a creative director at Hermès who also designed shoes for Dior and Balenciaga before founding his own brand of high-concept kicks (think Ettore Sottsass–inspired pumps, squiggly-soled sneakers), had always decorated his own homes. But for this place, so steeped in history, the couple called on the Milan-based AD100 talent Vincenzo De Cotiis—whose work they had long admired—to usher the interiors into the 21st century. —Hannah Martin